'The Animation Show'
'Animation Show' highlights the foremost of seldom-seen art
Friday, May 27, 2005
By John Hayes, Pittsburgh Enter-Gazette
If movies were about art, the animators behind short-subject festivals such as "Spike & Mike's" and "The Animation Show" would be major stars. But groundbreaking animation tends to show up only in art houses and occasionally in TV commercials.
"The Animation Show"
Rating
: Not rated, but includes animation violence and diction not suitable for young children and pre-adolescents.
Producers
: Mike Evaluate and Don Hertzfeldt
That began to convert two years ago courtesy of Mike Judge, the enlivenment supernova behind "Beavis and Butt-Head" and "King of the Hill," and Don Hertzfeldt, whom Filmmaker Arsenal calls one of the "excellent 25 directors to watch." Judge and Hertzfeldt cool the works of some of the world's best animators and finagled "The Animation Festival" into more North American movie theaters than any other in narrative. Cineplex bookers took note of the most commercially successful assemblage of animated short films ever.
Like its predecessor, "The Animation Show 2005" includes film shorts from multiple countries and genres including stop-motion photography, two-dimensional hand-drawn imagery, several three-dimensional computer animation styles, forgotten classics and new cartoons by Hertzfeldt and Judge. Six of the shorts have been nominated for Academy Awards.
Hand-illustrator Bill Plympton, whose "Parking" became a highlight of the first "Animation Show," is back with a hilarious, if wildly violent, guard dog whose paranoia and ambition to protect his master turns the neighborhood park into a killing field.
Jennifer Drummond's painting-over-film technique was amazing in "Waking Life." She's at it again on "F.E.D.S.," a six-minute look at sample-slinging supermarket food demo specialists.
A similar technique was used in the wispy "When the Day Breaks." The Canadian animators shot human actors on Hi-8 film and transferred it to VHS tape. Individual frames were printed out and augmented, giving the actors beaks, snouts and wings before filming the finished frames on 35mm.
The mixed-media, stop-action "Pan with Us" finds the Greek god Pan flitting through modern life, accompanied by a reading from Robert Frost. Painstaking clay stop motion action takes audiences on a wild wheelchair ride through a "hospital" that's right out of a slasher flick in the nearly 15-minute horror-adventure "Ward 13," and an Australian traditional 2-D illustrator poses the philosophical quandary: In a digital world, can analog find true love?
In "Mt. Head," a Japanese animator combines hand illustration and computer imagery in a modern interpretation of the Japanese story, "Atama-yama." The absence of shadow is the subject of an interesting French short created with acrylic on cel, and "Mars and Beyond" is an excerpt from an amazing 1957 sci-fi feature, created with hand illustration and what were then high-tech photo experiments, by Disney illustrator Ward Kimball.
"The Animation Show 2005" runs only at the Oaks Theater, Oakmont.
First published on May 27, 2005 at 12:00 am
John Hayes can be reached at
jhayes@post-gazette.com
or 412-263-1991.