WHO:	Mixed Reviewer Martin Scribbs
WHAT:	A review of THE ANIMATION SHOW. For more info, see the show's Web site.

Sigh.

According to its website, "every year, The Animation Show promises to put animated short films into more theaters than any other animation festival in American history." The brainchild of Hertzfeldt and unindicted co-conspirator Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill), THE ANIMATION SHOW should satisfy animation diehards and dilettantes alike. Boasting six Academy Award nominees for best animated short, the program I saw richly rewarded its audience with comedy, insight, kitsch, and wisdom, and every other fruit that the tree of art has ever bore. Playing to a full and appreciative house at the posh Ambler Theater, each segment of the show drew good response. (I'd like to especially thank the gentleman who, every time a Hertzfeldt title came up, shouted "YES!" That's a level of enthusiasm one rarely sees at a movie, except among those doing coke or getting surreptitiously blown.)

First up, Strange Invaders, wherein a father-to-be lets his anxiety over children spill into nightmarish dreams about aliens. Very funny, and those in the post-film chat who had children reported the short to be dead on. The animation style is 2-D, and reminds your unlettered correspondent a bit of Bob and Margaret.

Next, Mt. Head, wherein a Japanese scrooge eats even his cherry pits ("what a shame to waste them,") until a cherry tree starts to grow atop his bald dome. (Note: some audience members had readability problems with white subtitles on white images. They, of course, should learn Japanese.) While the short is supposedly based upon a traditional story in an ancient oral tradition, the infinite recursion that animator Koji Yamamura accomplishes between this man and his own head has to be seen to be believed.

THE ANIMATION SHOW highlights two Disney shorts, hearkening back to a time before the Magic Kingdom's animation studio was run by a pack of tone-deaf treacle addicts. The surrealistic beauty of Mars and Beyond can only be explained by its date of origin -- 1955. To the modern eye, which has seen so much tedious detail from the red planet, Ward Kimball's graceful and interesting exobiology looks preposterous. That Mars could be inhabited so lushly by flora and fauna so different from our own may indeed have been one of the noble lies that stoked our interest in space exploration. Vincent, drawn by Tim Burton while under contract with Disney, shows us the travails of preteen goth Vincent Malloy, as he tries to stay dark and mysterious while his mom tells him to go out and play. Hammy narration by Vincent Price makes the Addams- and Gorey-influenced short fly.

Indeed, one of the surprises about THE ANIMATION SHOW is how important sound can be in a medium defined by its visuals. Just as Price's doleful tones makes Vincent work, Hector Berloiz's "La Damnation de Faust" gives operatic voice to the Swiss La Course À L'Abime. I found La Course, a rotoscoped short, to be reminiscent of rollerskating through the Lourve -- beautiful, educational, kinetic, but more than a little disorienting.

Ident, from the same studios which have brought us Wallace and Gromit, Chicken Run, and Rex the Runt, encapsulates a man's daily grind. He is literally putty, molded and reshaped by each situation. He is stuck in a labyrinth, running the same circular route into the ground. (A woman in the after-show program announced that she was very into "labyrinth literature," which I take to mean that she has a dog-eared copy of Borges's Ficciones and a thing for Bowie in tight leather pants.) Our Everylump puts on masks, or has masks applied to him by others. And if he ever gets free of the rat race, he will harness himself right back up again for want of any better idea. My favorite aspect of Ident is the voices, which convey the content of the conversations without clearly articulating a single word. Instead, the 1998 short seems to predict the pastiche of languages and pantomimes used to such effect in the video game The Sims.

Fifty Percent Grey, an Irish offering, was drawn in the Twilight Zone, and is ready-made for audiences paranoid about the afterlife. I can no more elaborate on Bill Plympton's Parking than I could annotate a Charlie Chaplin routine or a Tom and Jerry cartoon. The Cathedral, which marks the program's most completely computerized short, gets points for meticulous rendering of light, shadow, skin, and cloth, but loses them immediately for being boring, overblown, mythopoetic hooey.

Das Rad combines CGI with stop-motion animation to show us human history from a geologic perspective. If you thought Treebeard the Ent (and here I really mean the Tolkien character, and not John Kerry) was a great idea inadequately executed in the LOTR movies, here are thematically similar characters (talking, scratching, jumping rock piles) done right.

Mike Judge contributes some funny line drawings and pencil tests, and a "Milton" short, originally made for SNL, that was recycled verbatim for the screenplay to Office Space.

THE ANIMATION SHOW promises to be an annual event. I promise to go every year. Even if it does enrich that talented creep, Don Amadeus Hertzfeldt.

-- Martin Scribbs