Educational Media Reviews Online

With a few additions and deletions from its Fall 2003 theatrical release, The Animation Show, Volume One (http://www.animationshow.com/dvd.html) has something for everyone, from casual viewers looking for entertainment to students and faculty studying film or the themes and stories. It showcases a collection of 20 shorts from 13 directors hailing from 8 countries and uses a wide variety of techniques: claymation, stop-motion animation, three-dimensional computer animation, computer-generated imagery (CGI), and traditional two-dimensional animation. Together, the films have no set theme except to promote the work of animators and the genre as a whole. Independently, they address issues as varied as death and dying, religion, ecology, cloning, handicaps, and history. The films and their directors have won various awards at festivals all over the world, with four of the films (Fifty Percent Grey, Katedra, Mt. Head, and Das Rad) nominated for Oscars by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Don Hertzfeldt’s (USA) trio produced exclusively for The Animation Show (Welcome to the Show, Intermission in the Third Dimension, and The End of the Show) are clear examples of humorous surrealism and his well-known Billy’s Balloon (1998) anthropomorphizes a seemingly innocuous child’s toy into an evil and malicious entity [note: this film’s soundtrack was off-sync on one of two players used]. A trilogy from Australian director Adam Elliot (1999’s Brother, 1998’s Cousin, and 1996’s Uncle) portrays one boy’s family life. Funny at times, each is spare and simple (black-and-white, claymation), yet remarkably poignant tribute to family hardships. Germany’s 2001 Das Rad (The Rocks) by Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel, and Heidi Wittlinger is a light-hearted look at history from the viewpoint of a pair of cairn-like rock piles. Also subtitled, Mt. Head (Japan, 2002) took Koji Yamamura six years to create and is a modern interpretation of a traditional Japanese Rakugo story, “Atama-yama”.

More than one-third of the films have little or no dialogue, but their stories are no less powerful. Parking is an unintentional ecological fable; the director, Bill Plympton (USA, 2003), was simply trying for humor in the style of Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, according to his commentary in the disc’s special features section. Moving Illustrations of Machines is Jeremy Solterbeck’s (USA, 2000) black-and-white portrayal/commentary on the convergence of organic machines and their man-made counterparts, originally conceived as a response to the cloning of Dolly, the sheep. Katedra (The Cathedral) (Poland, 2002) uses multiple computer techniques to tell Tomek Bagiński’s science fiction vision of Jacek Dukaj’s story, in which a pilgrim visits a beautiful cathedral on a distant planet. From Ireland comes Fifty Percent Grey by Ruairi Robinson (2001) which generates questions on religion, war, and death using a simple premise and thought-provoking ending.

Three of the films - La Course a L’Abime (Georges Schwizgebel, Switzerland, 1992), Aria, and Bathtime in Clerkenwell (Aleksey Budovsky, USA, 2002) - are essentially music videos; one classical, one opera, and one popular, respectively. Each portrays the music ably, with Pjotr Sapegin’s Aria (Canada, 2001) shining in its retelling of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly with stop-motion animation.

Another series, three “episodes” of The Adventures of Ricardo by Corky Quakenbush (USA, 1996) seemed out of place among the rest, but created an interesting contrast in style and content. Fans of Mike Judge’s work (Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, Office Space) and those looking at the development of animation will enjoy the Unfinished Early Pencil Tests and Other Experiments (USA, circa 1990) and the special features section on the disc, which includes trailers, commentaries, deleted and experimental shorts, and production art galleries totaling more than 30 additional minutes of footage and stills.