Re-Animated
Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt's latest program offers 12 weird and wonderful shorts
By Andy Klein
Back in the '80s and '90s, there were multiple animation anthologies in the theaters - Spike and Mike's Mellow Manor distributed two different constantly revised collections; Expanded Entertainment had annual editions of The Tournee of Animation; and every few years Los Angeles would host the massive World Animation Celebration. These outlets helped spark the huge growth in the field, as well as giving exposure to young artists who would create new, more daring shows for MTV, Nickelodeon, and other cable outlets.
The conundrum is that the field has now contracted: The only remaining annual collection is Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival. In 2003, ace cartoonists Don Hertzfeldt (Rejected) and Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill) debuted The Animation Show, which was intended to be annual but has been running a tad behind schedule. The current edition is the third, so biannual seems to be the reality.
Once again, the selection of 12 films tips a little more toward the serious than the comic; or maybe it would be accurate to say that it tips largely toward the weird, with a lot of technical diversity.
The funniest entry is Bill Plympton's "Guide Dog," a sequel to his Oscar-nominated "Guard Dog"; once again Plympton shows he knows canine psychology. Joanna Quinn's "Dreams and Desires: Family Ties" - which has a somewhat more restrained dog as a supporting character - centers on a woman charged with videotaping a wedding, who gets carried away with aesthetic ambition and ends up ruining the event. It's more realistic in its approach and features a less extreme kind of slapstick; I found it reasonably funny, but my enjoyment was hampered by the working-class British accents, which were so thick as to often be incomprehensible.
For compelling weirdness, it would be hard to beat Run Wrake's "Rabbit." Wrake has taken images from children's educational sticker books from the '50s - essentially a British version of our Dick and Jane books - and "repurposed" them into a story of surreal commerce and violence. Each image has a word tag, so we see explanatory onscreen labels as the "girl" takes the "knife" and slits open the "rabbit," from whose innards the "idol" leaps. Later they trade jars of "ink" and "feathers" to a "shopkeeper" for a truckload of "plum jam."
Some slighter entries are worthwhile: "Game Over" amusingly uses stop-motion animation of common objects to re-create the images of '70s videogames like Pac Man, Asteroids, and Space
Invaders, a clever idea that would have worn out its welcome at anything longer than its two-minute running time. In "Overtime," a group of very Kermit-like frogs do everything they can to keep alive the memory of their dead human friend, turning him into a puppet, even as he decomposes.
But, as in the second edition of The Animation Show, the centerpiece here is Hertzfeldt's latest. Between the ages of 18 and 23, Hertzfeldt - working mostly alone, drawing crude stick figures - turned out a series of wonderful shorts ("Ah, L'Amour," "Lily and Jim," "Billy's Balloon"), culminating in the sublime "Rejected," which was nominated for an Oscar but sadly didn't win. He then spent almost as long on "The Meaning of Life," which debuted in the second Animation Show. It showed a huge expansion in technique but didn't have the charm or huge laughs of its predecessor.
His new "Everything Will Be OK" just won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance for Best Short - the first animated film in a decade to prevail in a category that also includes live-action and documentary. It synthesizes the previous work's expanded technical range and less gag-oriented humor with a more involving, still often funny, story. Bill is an apparently average guy, with a trivial life, to whom strange things begin happening. Only slowly does the narrator reveal details suggesting that, well, something is wrong with Bill. Hertzfeldt frequently breaks up the frame here with multiple circular images, much like the thought balloons that sometimes appeared in early cinema, but here reflecting Bill's progressive disassociation.
