Packages of animated films have long traveled the nation’s arthouses. “The Animation Show” is a relatively recent addition, notching its fourth year with the current collection. As is perpetually the case with these things, the program is as grab-baggy as can be.
Even by those standards, “Animation Show 4” feels weak. I count five really good shorts in the bunch, with the rest falling along the lines of cutesy, often very well-animated offerings. For the most part, the animation isn’t the problem, despite a few intentionally low-tech efforts. Writing and conception are the problems.
“Western Spaghetti,” directed by a man called PES, uses a stop-motion animation technique reminiscent of the wild visions of Jan Svankmajer. The simple business of preparing spaghetti sauce and boiling pasta becomes an ingenious show when the “ingredients” are other kinds of household items.
Also good is “Jeu,” which goes for pure, drawn cartooning, in a largely abstract cascade of colored shapes and bustling figures. It’s a relief not to have a jokey story line, and the Prokofiev music is a plus.
I also liked “Forgetfulness,” a scratchy, simple illustration accompanying a poem by Billy Collins. The words are a rueful elegy for a perfect sense of memory, and the way things drop out with age.
Oscar-winning animator Bill Plympton returns with “Hot Dog,” an amusing tale of a canine aspiring to be a fireman; oddly, there’s not one fire hydrant gag in the entire short film.
And “Paintballing” is a strange little number, played out as though a video game, in which sprays of color explode across a field of play. It isn’t great, but at least it conveys somebody thinking about the cartoon medium.
The other films are either self-consciously weird, or they look like homemade productions thrown onto the Internet in hopes of attracting somebody’s attention with an outrageous short. That could explain “Angry Unpaid Hooker,” for instance, which pretty much lives up to its title.
Two tiny, quiet films by British animator Matthew Walker show promise, at least for understatement. “Operator” is a man making an inquisitive telephone call; “John and Karen” looks at a polar bear and a penguin trying to work out an awkward moment in their relationship.
If you’re a fan of short animation, you’ll almost certainly find enough to justify seeing this package. For non-fans, this collection is weirdly similar to virtually every animation omnibus that rolls out: a few visionary moments mixed in with a great deal of cute.
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