The Animation Show's new tour is just begining it's march across the country. These are just a few quick blurbs from our first handful of openings. We'll update as things progress. We'll post the full reviews in our press area when we've got a chance to catch up. Here are some of the highlights.
The Animation Show 4
New York Post
- DON'T be fooled by the title. "The Animation Show 4" isn't Disney and isn't for kids. Rather, it is a collection of 20 or so some times raunchy, often offensive and always entertaining animated shorts from around the world. Funniest, if you ask me, is Steve Dildarian's "Angry Unpaid Hooker." Tim's girlfriend arrives home from Bermuda and discovers him sharing the couch with the titular hooker, who wants her $300. (More of Tim's misadventures will be found this fall in a new HBO series.) Creepiest is Adam Smith and Alan Foulkes' "This Way Up," a Tim Burton-ish comedy about two undertakers who encounter bizarre problems delivering an elderly woman to her final resting place. In Matthew Walker's "John and Karen," John the polar bear apologizes to his beloved, a penguin named Karen. And in master animator Bill Plympton's "Hot Dog," a dog tries to help the experts at a fire. Get the idea?
New York Sun
-Given the rather profound poetry of a film such as "WALL-E" and the scathing satire of a television series such as "South Park," one could easily argue that we are living in a golden age of animation. Further evidence comes from "The Animation Show," a collection of animated shorts that returns to the big screen for the fourth time in six years, making its premiere today at IFC Center. Now overseen solely by Mike Judge — the man behind such hit animated TV shows as "Beavis and Butt-Head" and "King of the Hill" — "The Animation Show 4" ("Animation Show 3" was recently released on DVD) features some impressive new works from animators who have struggled in years past. What will surprise longtime fans this year is the franchise's embrace of shorter and more inventive material, along with a wide array of animation techniques, pairing up traditional with state-of-the-art experimental. The unexpected can be expected from the very first second, as an introductory segment, specially commissioned from Joel Trussell, explodes onto the screen. Mixing stick-figure Vikings crossing the ocean with the timely sounds of thrash metal, this rock featurette is a hilarious mix of modern and retro, a hieroglyphic head trip. While Mr. Trussell's segment is all about the visuals, other short films in "Animation Show 4" (which features more than two dozen shorts) defer to the dialogue. The wittiest back-and-forth is to be found in Steve Dildarian's "Angry Unpaid Hooker," which keeps the visuals streamlined — thin edges, bathed in white, little movement — as the verbal exchange takes flight. A wife arrives home to discover a husband sitting on the couch, arguing with a hooker — unpaid, as the title suggests, and unhappy about it. The humor stems from the husband's reaction, and the calm way with which he tries to talk himself out of this domestic disaster — reasoning with his wife, but all the while talking business with the prostitute. It's a twisted take on "Three's Company." More than just a short, the animation is reportedly the inspiration for a new, 10-episode HBO series this fall, to be titled "The Life and Times of Tim." Much as in years past, Mr. Judge has sprinkled episodic shorts throughout the 82-minute program. One such series, Dave Carter's "Psychotown," features two paper cutouts, both speaking with Australian accents, as they banter in a rapid-fire back-and-forth that is childish, vulgar, and hilarious. Another series, "Usavich," is the most surreal work to be found in the program — a head trip of a road trip featuring two non-speaking, egg-shaped rabbits as they journey through the country, reacting to various, physics-defying challenges with guttural groans and wide-eyed terror. Perhaps the most visually creative work of the entire program is the simple and streamlined "Love Sport: Paintballing." Playing out as a wordless story of small squares attacking each other in binary fashion, it has the feel of a classic Atari game, yellow cubes unleashing paintball hell on blue cubes, and then blue cubes launching a counteroffensive against the yellow team. It is beautiful, quirky, and evocative, not only blurring the line between war and sport, but also finding a way of fusing together the simplistic look of early computer games and the more complex undertones of an emotional back-and-forth. As always, Bill Plympton is part of the proceedings, this time with a bittersweet short titled "Hot Dog," in which man's best friend tries a little too hard to impress his owners, and pays the price for a big mistake. Following in the footsteps of "Animation Shows" past, a handful of shorts this year are more insane than ingenious. The most peculiar of them all is "Yompi the Crotch Biting Sloop," which features a yellow blob of clay attacking the groins of various humans. If "Yompi" runs the risk of turning off newcomers, first-time "Animation Show" audiences will be most delighted by the shorts that aim to be more serious, sober, and stylish. Smith and Foulkes's "This Way Up" takes its time in telling the story of two accident-prone undertakers trying to get a coffin to its final burial place. Matthew Walker's "Operator" is an almost-silent, one-sided conversation with a lonely man in his apartment who dials zero, looking for the phone number for God. Meanwhile, "Western Spaghetti," directed by PES, is a glorious, non-narrative experimental short that takes place entirely on the top of a stove. Nothing really happens, but what it lacks in plot, it more than makes up for in pure inventiveness, with spinning pieces of candy corn representing open flames, and cellophane as cooking oil. With all the unpaid hookers and nervous hot dogs, there's plenty of humor in "The Animation Show 4," and no doubt the laughs will make this a must-see for college audiences. But there's also more beauty at play here than some will be expecting, and a range of styles and technology that suggest animators are trying their very best to push this burgeoning genre into loftier territory.
Village Voice
- Less hit-or-miss than the long-running Spike & Mike packages of drawn-to-the-dark-side filth, this touring animation program curated by Mike Judge (this time without co-founder Don Hertzfeldt) has hit its stride, emphasizing niceties such as craft alongside reliable crowd-pleasers like the ultraviolent deaths of cute little creatures and a self-explanatory something called "Yompi the Crotch-Biting Sloup." Faster and funnier than the somewhat lugubrious Volume 3, the new program features a decided international bent; whether from France, Germany, or closer to home, the 20-odd selections mesh with Judge's skewed sensibility. Standouts include Smith and Foulkes's This Way Up, a Corpse Bride–esque CGI fantasy with two cadaverous undertakers seeing more than they ever wanted of the underworld; Georges Schwizgebel's Jeu, with its furiously morphing Escher perspectives; and Steve Dildarian's Angry Unpaid Hooker, the ultimate unexplainable domestic crisis rendered in scratchy line drawings and deadpan conversational hilarity. (It bodes well for Dildarian's upcoming HBO series.) The technique alone can be dazzling, as in PES's Western Spaghetti, two minutes of stop-motion magic tricks that convert pincushions into tomato sauce and Post-It notes into butter pats. Or it can be so minimal that visual crudeness becomes part of the joke—as in Grant Orchard's Love Sport—Paintballing, in which tiny cartoon rectangles enact an arms-race Armageddon on the field of pellet-splatter combat. For older kids only.
Time Out New York
-The fourth collection of animated shorts compiled by the indispensable Mike Judge (sans his usual partner in crime, Don Hertzfeldt) is typically funny and violent—usually both at once. Some recurring bits, notably Dave Carter’s punchy “Psychotown” vignettes, give this year’s globe-spanning program a more unified feel than previous efforts. Among the many highlights are Stefan Mueller’s “Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker,” about a loud-music police complaint gone hilariously wrong; Steve Dildarian’s deadpan “Angry Unpaid Hooker”; and “Blind Spot” from France’s Gobelins School of Animation, in which an elderly woman falls victim to some cleverly edited surveillance footage.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
-Director Mike Judge has given us the cartoon series "King of the Hill" and
"Beavis and Butt-Head," as well as the live-action movies "Office Space" and
the far-sighted "Idiocracy." To that list of successes, we can add Volume 4 of
"The Animation Show," the latest in the fine anthology series he formerly
co-curated with Don Hertzfeldt. Judge's tastes seem to skew in a subversive
direction, but these 20-some short
films are not generally crude in temperament — or style. Some of them are
downright lovely, such as "Jeu," an Escher-like dance of perspectives set to
the music of Prokofiev. The best eye candy is in the stop-motion
"Western Spaghetti," which is like a
sunny-side-up cooking demonstration by the Brothers Quay.
A droll but poignant short that has played between movies on the Sundance
channel is "Forgetfulness," a poem and photo collage about the erasure of
memory.
Computer animation is represented by "Burn Safari" in which a tour group of
malevolent WALL-E's harass an ape in the jungle.
Two dry British 'toons stand out, one in which a polar bear visits his penguin
girlfriend for tea and apologizes, and one in which a young chap telephones God
to ask him a very puzzling question.
Equally conversational if less polite is "Angry Unpaid Hooker," a crudely
scrawled scene of embarrassment between a sassy street walker, a slacker in
denial and his home-too-soon significant other.
In the same transgressive vein is "Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen and Mr. Horlocker,"
a Tarantino-esque 'toon from Germany about drug dealers and a sadomasochistic
cop who live in the same apartment building.
Nearest to Judge's heart seems to be three episodes of "Psychotown," an
Australian version of the vile Terrance and Phillip on "South Park" who
themselves are a version of "Beavis and Butt-Head." But it's to Judge's credit
that his curatorial choices encompass a world of wonders.
Dallas Morning News
-Animation impresario Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-head, King of the Hill) has again corralled an assortment of irreverent, funny and consistently entertaining animated shorts into a brief package. In this fourth go-round of The Animation Show, Mr. Judge has picked more than two dozen of his favorites from around the world, with choices coming from the U.S., France, Canada, Britain, Australia and elsewhere.
In the last decade or so, Pixar has shown what magic can be created on a computer, while South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker have proven that entertainment can even be found with simple cutouts. This technical transformation has quickly opened up animation, making it a democratic art form in which someone like Mr. Judge can become rich, famous and an industry favorite in short fashion.
As usual, with someone as admittedly juvenile and rebellious as Mr. Judge, the shorts range from the innocuous but strange (Trevor Jimenez's "Key Lime Pie") to the foul-mouthed but hilarious offerings of Australian Dave Carter. Mr. Carter is the creator of the three short episodes of "Psychotown," which feature South Park-like crude figures who always have something shocking to contribute.
The jarring "Angry Unpaid Hooker" comes from Steve Dildarian's upcoming HBO series The Life and Times of Tim. Live action mixes with animation in both "Prof. Nieto Show" and "Raymond." And making their U.S. debut are several entries from Gobelins, the French animation college.
From England, Matthew Walker's low-key "John and Karen" spotlights a diffident polar bear struggling to apologize to his girlfriend, a penguin. Mr. Walker also scores with "Operator," another demure offering in which a lonely man talks to God on the telephone.
In compiling the show, Mr. Judge wisely offers a wide selection, including currently popular computer-generated works. The wise guys behind the Motorola Movie Rabbit, the animation team of Smith and Foulkes, present "This Way Up," their latest computer creation and also their first commissioned short. In it, two undertakers work overtime to lay a single body to rest.
Mr. Judge also gathers a wide sampling of hand-drawn shorts, and, of course, some stop-motion Claymation, such as Corky Quakenbush's three assaults by "Yompi," the cuddly, doughy character with a most disturbing habit.
The collection unfolds rapidly, so if a selection appears that bores, upsets or, more likely, offends, it will quickly be replaced by another in this flavorful, animated menu.
People Newspapers
-About halfway into The Animation Show, after a dozen shorts about such things as homicidal monkeys and air-guitar-playing corpses, poet Billy Collins' soothingly sardonic voice suddenly appears, and an animation illuminates images evoked from a poem of his: "The name of the author is the first to go / followed obediently by the title, the plot..." The poem's title? "Forgetfulness." The animation in this piece deserves to be included in this inventive collection, but it's as though the producers were acknowledging the fact that two dozen shorts in 80 minutes are perhaps too many too quickly, however valuable and illuminating they are. One's liable to forget a few.
The man behind the collection, Mike Judge (creator of Beavis and Butt-Head and Office Space), wants to show short films somewhere besides the Internet. Now in its fourth year, The Animation Show is one of the few opportunities a moviegoer has to see short animation on the big screen.
Hundreds of short animated films are made every yea, many of them quite good, but very few of them ever see a movie theater. Some might get accepted into a film festival, or even be nominated in the Best Animated Short category at the Academy Awards. Although the Oscar for these shorts was created 50 years before the Academy created the Best Animated Feature category, no one ever has an opinion on which nominee should win because almost no one has seen them. Even the best animated shorts usually get a few thousand views on the internet and then fall into obscurity. Nevertheless, these films keep getting made - and not just by big companies like Disney and Pixar. As evidenced by the extensive credits for each film in The Animation Show, short toons are often created with large production teams, and they run the gamut of animation styles, from the talking-cardboard feel of Dave Carter's "Psychotown" to the complex live-action animation from "Raymond." They come from all over the world. Japan, France, Germany, Switzerland, England, and the USA are represented in this collection. From all these films, Mike Judge can pick only a handful each year to display and celebrate, as well as a few that he commissioned specifically for the project. His choices show his distinctive tastes - sometimes for the crude or childish, usually for the funny, and always for the weird. Given his predilections, it's amazing that the show ends up being rather fantastic and inspiring (even invigorating) and sometimes touching. Despite plots that touch on drug-abuse, prostitution, wrongful incarceration, prison camp, and high cholesterol, there is enough eye-popping visual inventiveness, and undeniable hilarity to make even the darkest themes seem somehow innocent. There's even tenderness, on display especially in the simple work of British animator Matthew Walker, whose shorts "Operator" and "John and Karen" are a welcome change of pace. The quality and complex global themes of Pixar's Wall-E, now in theaters, demonstrate again that some of the finest directors in the world are making animated films. They have things to say, and their broad audience - none broader, in fact - ensures both their endless opportunity to enlighten and their duty to entertain. Animation takes us wherever it will - and that's everywhere. It is this display of possibility that makes this collection worthwhile. The Animation Show will take you to only a few of these possibilities, but if you go, you will enjoy most of the worlds imagined. And some might be more difficult to leave than others - such as the grim world of two hapless undertakers in Smith and Foulkes' "This Way Up," or the culinary world of PES's "Western Spaghetti," which shows a real hand making a pasta lunch, with ingredients too unbelievable to give away. Indeed, the wonder behind this project in general is its ability to surprise and delight, not only with its content but with its visual decisions. Even if tomorrow you're already forgetting the authors and their plots, the images will linger.
SF Chronicle ’96 Hours’ Calender section
-With titles like "Angry Unpaid Hooker," "Psychotown" and "Yompi the Crotch-biting Sloup," you'd expect "The Animation Show 4" to be as sick and twisted as Spike and Mike's annual shows. But you'd be wrong.
Co-producers Mike Judge ("Office Space," "Beavis and Butthead"), Robert May and Rebecca Moline are going for laughs, not gross-out - although there might be a little of that element as well.
"We grew up seeing the 'Sick and Twisted' shows, and a lot of Mike's early work was in those shows," said May, referring to Judge, as opposed to "Sick and Twisted" founder Mike Gribble.
"But those shows don't have the comic gold they used to have. 'The Animation Show' started because we were going to find comedy and have a funnier program overall."
What's interesting about the series is the varied animation styles, from the seemingly hand-drawn "Hot Dog" by indie animation legend Bill Plympton and the traditional 2-D style of "John and Karen" (charmingly, about a humongous polar bear who tries to apologize to a tiny penguin over a cup of tea) to elaborate computer-manic shorts such as the Swiss shape-shifting "Jeu" and the strange, hilarious French short "Raymond," in which a swimming instructor becomes the subject of lab tests.
It leaves one to wonder why the big animated films, though often wonderful, have the same uniform look. Clearly, there is more than one way to animate a cat.
"That's really our hope," said May of bringing these different styles to public attention. "There's a potential for so much more variations. A lot of what you see on TV is similar. You don't see a lot of different styles. There is hope, though. Lower-budget animation is getting even cheaper. There are all these (computer) methods that maximize time."
May, who was raised in Concord and lives in Hollywood, said the recent art house success of "Persepolis," with its distinctive look, is the kind of awareness that "The Animation Show" is trying to foster. With that in mind, May and his producing partners commissioned works for the first time. Their choices include a creative stop-motion piece ("Western Spaghetti"); "Psychotown," by talented Australian artist Dave Carter; and the funniest movie you'll ever see about pallbearers, "This Way Up," by the animation team Smith and Foulkes.
"We want the audience to leave the theater overwhelmed," May said.
SF Weekly
-There’s a lot more to Mike Judge than the mind numbing, rude-boy antics of Beavis and Butt-Head led us to believe. The guy has brains, talent, and — hold on to your seat — taste. Sure, the mix of mind-twisting comic shorts he’s compiled for the fourth edition of "The Animation Show" includes a couple of brief odes to slapstick violence and adolescent grossness. But they’re trumped by an array of amazing art, from the exquisite noir stylings of Trevor Jimenez’ Key Lime Pie to the cinematic, drug-addled delirium of Stefan Mueller’s Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker (which screened at the S.F. International Film Festival mere weeks ago). Stop-motion devotees will devour PES’ Dada–esque Western Spaghetti, while Steve Dildarian’s Angry Unpaid Hooker (starring the shameless hero of his upcoming animated HBO series The Life and Times of Tim) delivers the goods for fans of character comedy. The most astonishing works, however, come from the Gobelins School of Animation in Paris, confirming that the French are still the sharpest pencils in the drawer (The Triplets of Belleville, anyone?). Dildarian and Dave Carter, the congenitally irreverent Aussie creator of Psychotown, appear at the screenings July 5, ready to attest to Mike Judge’s taste in burgundy and Brioni.
SF Bay Guardian
-Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill creator Mike Judge compiles an irresistible medley of innovative independent shorts from around the world in the fourth installment of The Animation Show. Featuring the understated absurdity of Matthew Walker's Operator, Corky Quakenbush's warped Yopi, with its adorably creepy crotch-biting protagonist, and the stunning geometric wizardry of Swiss director Georges Schwizgebel's Jeu, this collection is a veritable Whitman's Sampler of animated treats. Hot Dog by veteran animator Bill Plympton has heart while the stop-motion Western Spaghetti, by PES — in which everyday objects like pick-up sticks, Post-its, and bubble wrap stand in for spaghetti ingredients — is as visually quirky and clever as anything that Michel Gondry has ever done. Steve Dildarian's hysterical Angry Unpaid Hooker begins with a sly young man named Tim trying to convince his girlfriend that the prostitute sitting on his couch climbed in through a ventilation duct. With over two dozen offbeat shorts, The Animation Show 4 will have you clamoring for more.
SF Chronicle
-Go on YouTube right now, and you'll find more than two dozen live performances by the Christian rock band Stryper, a few thousand soccer goals by the Brazilian player Ronaldinho and the collected works of Mr. Bill. But you won't find Steve Dildarian's "Angry Unpaid Hooker," a hilarious seven-minute animated short that premieres at "The Animation Show 4," the latest random collection of comedy, carnage and trippyness collected by "Beavis and Butthead" creator Mike Judge. The work this year is inconsistent, with some truly memorable entries sharing screen time with a few that arguably don't match the quality of previous shows. But in an age when people spend their days watching tiny videos on a computer, the opportunity to see top-shelf animation on a big screen seems more relevant than ever. Like its predecessors, "The Animation Show 4" displays a combination of styles, from a computer-polished short from commercial animators Smith & Foulkes that looks better than any "Shrek" movie, to a Paintball battle from Grant Orchard that appears as if it were made on an old Commodore 64. Also among the two dozen shorts is another hand-drawn "Guard Dog" entry by Bill Plympton, and the excellent "Western Spaghetti" by stop-motion keeper-of-the-flame PES - which uses Rubik's Cube pieces, pick-up sticks and other popular culture detritus to create a pasta dinner. Arguably the most entertaining (and low-tech) short comes from Dildarian, a San Francisco resident whose "The Life and Times of Tim" begins this fall on HBO. "Angry Unpaid Hooker" gives us a taste of the series' dry politically incorrect humor (Tim's girlfriend is home from town, and there's a crack whore on the couch who wants $300), complete with the funniest line we've seen in a movie this year. "I vacuumed," Tim says, during the peak of his excuse-making. "Did you notice?" The show definitely misses hand-drawn animation prodigy Don Hertzfeldt, who co-hosted the first three "Animation Show" installments and contributed one of his works to each. And whether it's a coincidence or not, there seems to be more subpar work, including multiple episodes of the repetitive "Yompi the Crotch-Biting Sloup," which delivers exactly what the name promises, and nothing more. Other shorts, including the disturbing and confusing "Raymond," seem designed specifically for the hallucinogenic drug users in the crowd. But even when "The Animation Show 4" starts to go off the rails, something wonderful is usually right around the corner. Smith & Foulkes, whose resume includes a Coca-Cola Super Bowl ad, close the show with "This Way Up," a brilliant piece of undertaker-themed entertainment that answers the question, "What if Pixar hired Stephen King to write their next movie?" You won't find that on YouTube, either. And even if you could, a body repeatedly falling out of a casket really needs to be seen on the big screen to be appreciated.
Seattle Times
- Touring programs of short films are an endangered species in the age of Internet distribution, but Mike Judge continues to nurture a theatrical audience for independent animation. Not surprisingly, the creator of "Beavis & Butt-head" and Fox's long-running animated sitcom "King of the Hill" compiles his annual "Animation Show" with an emphasis on outré comedy for grown-ups who refuse to grow up. Featuring more than two dozen works from around the world, "The Animation Show 4" includes a few artistically redeeming shorts for a touch of class, but goofy mayhem still gets top priority. Judge has also commissioned four original works exclusively for this year's program, each reflecting the seemingly unlimited variety of techniques and styles that have become a staple of Judge's yearly compilations. Even when you account for juvenile trifles like "Yompi the Lovable Crotch-Biting Sloup," it's an entertaining showcase for ingenuity, beginning with Joel Trussell's wacky "Show Opener," a manic tribute to heavy-metal air guitar. "Yompi," the brainchild of clay animator Corky Quackenbush, resembles a yellow mutation of the Pillsbury doughboy. In three separate one-minute shorts, this paunchy little charmer snuggles up to his victims, batting his puppy-dog eyes before baring a mouthful of nasty-looking fangs and chomping his favorite part of the human anatomy. Resistance is futile: Your inner 12-year-old will be laughing out loud. Commissioned from Australian animator Dave Carter, three one-minute "Psychotown" shorts are equally childish but irresistibly hilarious, using simple cutout figures in a staccato barrage of nonsensical dialogue and wanton absurdity. In stark contrast, the humor from award-winning British animator Matthew Walker is perfectly droll and understated: "Operator" features a young man's pleasant phone chat with God, while "John and Karen" presents the amusingly low-key reunion of an unlikely couple: a polar bear and a penguin. Steve Dildarian's "Angry Unpaid Hooker" is the basis of a new, 10-episode animated series premiering this fall on HBO ("The Life and Times of Tim"), employing simple animation and deadpan dialogue as the main character must explain the presence of a cranky prostitute to his disapproving girlfriend. France's Gobelins School of Animation is the source of several new works from gifted young animation students, the most impressive being "Voodoo," in which an overconfident adventurer becomes the unwitting pawn of a mischievous witch doctor. France is also represented by "Raymond," a zany dose of slapstick in which a lazy swimming instructor is jostled about like a toy on a string, the unwitting guinea pig in an experiment involving high-velocity manipulation of his body. Some of the best shorts in "The Animation Show 4" are computer-generated marvels like "This Way Up," commissioned from the celebrated animation team of Smith & Foulkes. But there's also the poetic, low-tech simplicity of "Forgetfulness" (an effectively grungy meditation on fleeting memory), the stop-motion cleverness of "Western Spaghetti" (in which everyday objects become the ingredients of a colorful meal) and the geometrically abstract swirl of colors and shapes in the Swiss short "Jeu" (also shown at SIFF earlier this month). Tim Burton fans will love "This Way Up," a visually inventive, madcap Gothic tale of two undertakers and a decidedly uncooperative corpse. The use of CGI to resemble old-school animation is further indication that all kinds of animation are thriving with the introduction of new and increasingly accessible technology.
Detroit Metro Times
-Not to be confused with Spike and Mike's endless spool of fart jokes, violence and misogyny, Mike Judge (King of the Hill, Office Space) curates this fourth anthology of traveling animated shorts gathered from around the world, this time without partner Don Hertzfeldt. And, unlike last year's omnibus of death and destruction, this year's collection is lighter in tone and decidedly comic in spirit, boasting an energetic mix of lowbrow and highbrow efforts. As you might expect, the program runs the gamut from eye-popping, groundbreaking innovation to crafty simplicity to head-scratching bizarreness to the inevitable Bill Plympton contribution. And as with any compilation, the quality varies according to taste. The true joy comes from experiencing animation that goes beyond the kiddie efforts of cable television and big-budget CGI films. Sure, The Venture Brothers and The Simpsons are fashioned for adults, but The Animation Show approaches its subject as both entertainment and art. The vivid imagery on display includes hand-drawn, computer-generated, stop-action and mixed-media work that evokes moods and stories you simply won't find on Adult Swim. It's the kind of stuff that only animation obsessives, commissioned French film students (from Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image, in this case) and grant recipients from the National Film Board of Canada have the time and resources to make. The best of the bunch is Grant Orchard's Atari-meets-Jackson Pollock Lovesport: Paintballing — an incredible two-minute video game killing spree of vibrant paint splatters — and Burning Safari, a Pixar-like encounter between robotic aliens and a very angry ape. For something with a little more narrative thrust, there's German filmmaker Stefan Muller's impressive Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker, an entertaining mixture of Tarantino-esque storytelling and psychedelic imagery as an angry police officer responds to a noise complaint at a skeevy apartment building. For those looking for something more "Judgian," there's Steve Dildarian's Angry Unpaid Hooker, the precursor to his soon-to-debut animated HBO show The Life and Times of Tim. Its Bic pen-drawn animation is easily reminiscent of Beavis and Butt-Head, while its deadpan humor harks back to Comedy Central's Dr. Katz series. In direct contrast, Matthew Walker's very British John & Karen recasts its lover's spat over tea and biscuits with an offended penguin and contrite polar bear. And if anthropomorphization is your thing, Satosho Tomioka's recurring Usavich episodes, featuring a pair of criminal bunnies and their frog and goldfish sidekicks, are simultaneously creepy and cute as only Japanese animation can be. After nearly two-dozen shorts, the program wraps up with Smith & Foulkes' wonderfully choreographed computer-animated This Way Up, featuring a pair of undertakers whose wayward coffin gets caught up in a series of Rube Goldberg-style mishaps. It's the kind of gothic, stylized animation that has Oscar-nominee written all over it. Despite a trio of predictable Claymation crotch-biting gags and the amusing but obviously destined-for-TV Psychotown, this year's Animation Show once again does a terrific job of introducing audiences to a wide palette of styles and storytelling, proving that animation provides filmmakers with endless artistic freedom and that, whatever your taste, you're never more than seven minutes from the next selection.
Philadelphia City Pages
-It's easy to say Mike Judge's collection of animated shorts - none of which is longer than seven minutes - is aimed at the stunted attention spans of the modern audience. But don't mistake brevity for simplicity; many of these are marvelous works of inventive, thoughtful comedy. Take Matthew Walker's Operator, wherein a regular joe dials information on a whim and finds himself connected to God. Or LOVESPORT: Paint Balling, in which cute little rectangles engage in brutal, colorful battle. Even after all these years, Bill Plympton still amazes, this time with the conclusion to his heartbreaking, hilarious Guard Dog trilogy. His brand of broad adventure-comedy is perfectly suited to those captivating colored pencil swirls. They're not all winners in Animation 4; some shorts lean too heavily on ugliness or pretension while others dry up too soon. (There's really no reason for more than one episode of Yompi the Crotch-Biting Sloup. He bites crotches. Got it.) But the highs are high, like Steve Dildarian's Angry Unpaid Hooker, artistically crude but charming and unpredictable. (Look for Dildarian's stuff to show up on HBO in the fall.) The most thoroughly enjoyable piece - This Way Up by Smith and Foulkes - concerns two hapless undertakers trying desperately to get coffin A into hole B. It's kind of a throwback to silent era physical comedy, but it's also a stunning example of animated storytelling at its most engaging.
Los Angeles Times
-THE PRODUCERS of "The Animation Show," Robert May and Rebecca Moline, are aware of a certain stereotype about cartoon fans. "Animation is typically deemed to be either for children or perverts," May says, only half-joking, from his office in North Hollywood. "We are firmly in the middle. Our show is for adults, based mostly on mature subject matter, but I wouldn't call this 'Fritz the Cat.' " No kittens canoodling, to put it demurely, but this year's program of two-dozen-plus independent short films definitely takes a ribald tone. "The Animation Show," which has put together three previous feature-length collections, started in 2003 with Mike Judge of "Beavis and Butt-head" fame and Oscar-nominated animator Don Hertzfeldt curating, but this year finds Judge solely in control. Hertzfeldt, creator of the short "Rejected," is working on TV projects. After last year's somber program, or, as May called it, "a dozen shorts on death," Judge and the producers wanted the show to play lighter and faster. "This year we tried to focus more on comedy," Judge wrote in an e-mail. "This tour is like the midnight shows I loved to watch [at the International Tourneés of Animation] with a good mix of comedy and shorts that are visually amazing to look at on the big screen." The sensibility for "The Animation Show 4," opening at the Nuart on Friday with Judge in attendance, is indeed very Judgian. Steve Dildarian's six-minute deadpan short, "Angry Unpaid Hooker," is a throwback to the "Beavis" days of crude animation, with ink-scratched hair and squawking mouths. No silky computer 3-D here. "I drew 'Angry Unpaid Hooker' with a Bic pen, and then my girlfriend [Leynette Cariapa] added color in Photoshop," Dildarian said from his home in San Francisco. "I wanted it to look raw and wrong. It didn't look like someone who knew animation was involved." Dildarian, who has worked extensively as a copywriter, most notably creating Budweiser's lizard and donkey ads, is now neck-deep in production on "The Life and Times of Tim," his animated HBO show debuting in September. But even with a bigger budget and HBO's image as an arbiter of classy TV fare, Dildarian is preserving his messy, naive style. "We tried to hire people who don't have animation experience. . . . Once they start drawing too well, the perspective gets too accurate; it loses its soul." It's relatively hard to get play for animation outside the festival circuit. But there is one exception: the Internet, where anything that whittles off two minutes of one's workday can turn into a sensation, given enough clicks. "All of these new media outlets have made the short form incredibly popular again," Judge wrote. But a thumbnail image with tinny sound through earphones can't compete with the virtuosity of the theater. "Nothing replaces seeing this work on the big screen. . . . These films play differently when you see them projected with an audience."
San Diego North County Times
-The traveling animation show compiled by Mike Judge is now in its fourth incarnation, arriving Friday for a week-long stay at the Ken Cinema. "The Animation Show 4" again presents more than 20 offbeat, nonconformist animated entries, differing in creative rigor, but almost all with merit, however aghast they may leave the viewer. Fans of way-out-there animation will have their fill, with entries such as "Raymond" and "Yompi." Storylines aren't as crucial as creativity, but characters sometimes open eyes, as with the aforementioned Yompi, a strange little beast who enjoys biting where most folks least like to get bit. Other efforts explore animated boundaries both in form and context. This is stuff for adults, though not so much X-rated as unflinching in its brazen storylines. "The Animation Show 4" is likely to delight intense animation followers, while alternately puzzling and pleasantly surprising those eager to know more about this ever-evolving art form.
Washington Times
-"The Animation Show" remains a virtual stick in the eye to the folks behind "Kung Fu Panda," "Toy Story" and every other glossy animated feature churned out by Hollywood. Produced by "Beavis & Butt-head" creator Mike Judge, the theatrical showcase gathers the world's most eclectic animators for a compilation like no other. The shorts can be silly, garish or bawdy. Yet regardless of the quality, they're bracingly original - and not for mass consumption. Eccentricity, not the ability to inspire a fast-food tie-in, serves as the series' prime directive. Narrative cohesiveness too often gets shoved aside as a result. "The Animation Show 4" continues that tradition with more than 24 original shorts, several commissioned specifically for the film series. Today's animated fare leans heavily on computers, but the media used here run the gamut from clay to the crudest of pencil sketches. Traditional animation - the kind that powered everything from Popeye to the Smurfs - is featured prominently throughout the latest "Show" grab bag. It's hard to find fault with the array of stylists chosen for this fourth installment. No two shorts look remotely alike. However, for every dazzling segment comes another that will leave audiences numb.
The film introduces us to some animators we'll be seeing more from soon enough. Steve Dildarian's "Angry Unpaid Hooker," for example, provides a glimpse of the tone behind his upcoming HBO series, "The Life and Times of Tim." The animation here may be rudimentary, but it's in support of relentlessly funny material. A woman comes home to find her husband sharing their couch with a prostitute. The low-key humor and resulting slow burns are priceless, even if the cranky animation means the figures barely move a muscle. Other shorts are nearly as dizzying as anything conjured up by Pixar. "This Way Up" brings a lyrical beauty to the tale of two undertakers trying to move a casket to its final resting place. The computer-generated imagery here is stunning, and the visual humor is just as accomplished.
Washington Post
- My own favorite was "Lovesport: Paintballing," by Grant Orchard, an examination of the abstract dynamics of the almost-war game, which by its end becomes a haunting reflection on the inevitable logic of battle. And it's all done without using the human figure. "The Life & Times of Tim," by Steve Dildarian, on the other hand, is straight from the "B and B" playbook, as it watches a particularly shaggy young man try to explain the prostitute his girlfriend has just found him in bed with. Very funny. You won't like it all, but you will like somewhere between most and enough of it.
Boston Phoenix
- This traveling collection of international animation gems is back, with the capable Mike Judge curating. Any collection has highs and lows, so I’ll concentrate on the faves that stuck in my memory. Aesthetic joys include Grant Orchard’s Pong-meets-Pollock “Lovesport: Paintballing” and Georges Schwizgebel’s elegant, old-school “Jeu.” There’s rollicking mayhem and skewed humor in the sophisticated computer animation entries out of France’s Gobelins school. But the standout twisted scenario is German filmmaker Stefan Muller’s “Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker,” which is about dastardly doings behind doors in a cheap apartment building. And the weird-ass championship belt goes to Satosho Tomioka’s “USAvich, ep. 18: Beware of Dance!” — creepy-cute as only the Japanese can do it. A syncopated car ride with humanoid bunnies and a frog that shits out a live goldfish, this one will be on a permanent loop in my brain for weeks to come.
Boston Globe
-"The Animation Show" rounds up a fourth collection of new shorts (about two dozen) and descends upon the Kendall Square Theater today. Mike Judge, the creator of "Beavis and Butt-Head" and the director of "Office Space," curated this program, whose styles run a wide a gamut; the distance traveled is as vast as the difference between Judge's famous primitively drawn cartoon series and the wit of his live-action workplace classic. One of the best shorts is "Paintballing." Grant Orchard applies his Atari aesthetic to paintball (he's done dominoes and sumo wrestling, too). Here little pegs inch along and shoot dotted lines at each other. Every once in a while, a hit target explodes a splash of brilliant liquid that sophisticates its primitive video-game roots. An episode of Steve Dildarian's "The Life and Times of Tim" works as a crudely drawn sitcom in which Tim's girlfriend comes home to find a half-sober hooker in their apartment. The short and the title character have a lot in common. Somehow they both manage to use wry comedy to climb their way out of the sexual and racial holes each digs (the hooker is black). HBO has picked up "Tim," which is somewhat understandable since it plays like "Curb Your Enthusiasm" for men who wear $200 jeans. Georges Schwizgebel's "Jeu" uses figures to create beautiful abstractions. The images fluidly shift shape, and the shapes shift your perception of what the images can do and where they're going. The simplicity evokes impressionism and pushes toward the surrealism of Magritte, while the Prokofiev on the soundtrack contributes an additional layer of grace. What Stefan Mueller's "Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker" lacks in grace it makes up for in kinky, stoned energy. A disgruntled gentleman calls the police on his neighbors and chaos follows. Mueller combines a bunch of styles into a single warped disturbance of the peace that ultimately looks as though it's had a hit of whatever its characters are using. "Blind Spot," by a gang of French folks, thoroughly integrates its digital animation with the ironically cruel conclusion of its convenience store robbery. Formally speaking, the cleverest piece in this year's batch is "Raymond" by another French collective, BIF. They've combined live-action and photorealist 3-D animation for the tale of a lazy pool guy who wants to swim with whales, or something like that. Basically, he's turned into a lab rat and manipulated by drops of paint that land in the cone around his head. It's a comical piece of science fiction whose visual trickery warrants a trip to the Kendall.
The Chicago Reader
-The ongoing decline of the Spike & Mike festivals, with their crappy computer animation and pointlessly scatological gags, has been offset by the growing excellence of Mike Judge's Animation Show, so successful that this year Judge has actually commissioned work from four artists. Steve Dildarian's Angry Unpaid Hooker (2005) is just as naughty as the crudest Spike & Mike entry, but its story of a husband trying to explain to his wife why there's a call girl in their living room also has genuine wit and razor-sharp timing. Smith & Foulkes's This Way Up, about a couple of pallbearers chasing an errant corpse, renders its slapstick gags in velvety black-and-white 3-D images. PES, whose stop-motion video game parody Game Over was a highlight of last year's edition, returns with Western Spaghetti, in which colorful bits are used to represent an Italian meal in progress.
Time Out Chicago
-In its fourth outing, this solid annual traveling show offers up aesthetic wonders and sharp little bits of comedy in roughly equal measure. The standout for us is Stefan Müller’s “Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker,” which captures three perspectives on a series of events that become increasingly hilarious in each telling. Steve Dildarian’s “Angry Unpaid Hooker” takes the comedy of discomfort to extremes as a woman returns from a business trip to find her boyfriend has the title personage in the apartment. Other entries exploit the possibilities of animation better (watch for Georges Schwizgebel’s “Jeu”), but we’ll be recalling bits of “Angry Unpaid Hooker” weeks from now.
Chicago Tribune
-"The Animation Show" zips along with a wide variety of amazing creative visions. Two of the most remarkable, hilarious and clever pieces deal with perspective: "Blind Spot" (another Pixar-like Gobelins student project) shows the gap between real life and what security cameras catch, while "Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen & Mr. Horlocker" first shows what an angry cop looking for a loud party sees when he bangs on various doors, then goes back to show what was really going on behind the scenes. And Georges Schwizgebel's aptly named visual game "Jeu" switches perspectives every few seconds, sending recognizable shapes through a giddy visual cartwheel.
There are some pros in the crowd among the students and comedians: Solo animation pioneer Bill Plympton returns with a new installment of his series about a hyper, loaf-shaped dog, and the commercial team Smith & Foulkes presents a brilliantly choreographed CG short about two undertakers desperately trying to get a coffin to its final resting place. But regardless of the source—schools, studios or home computers—"The Animation Show 4" is a terrific program. Most of the pieces are short, smart and lively, so the show can get a little overwhelming in its sheer quantity, like a particularly intense fireworks show. But it's great to have too many high-quality options instead of too few. Come prepared to ooh and aah.
Aint It Cool News
-The three "Yompi the Crotch-biting Sloup" shorts are bound to become cult classics, while "Raymond" from Bif Productions is a doozy of a mind-fuck involving a swimming instructor looking for a way to get to the ocean using experimental drugs. My second-favorite short, "This Way Up," about a pair of undertakers trying to get a coffin to the funeral on time, is as good as any Pixar short in recent history and far more sinister than any of the Tim Burton-produced animated features. But the one short I could (and did) watch dozens of times is "Love Sport Paint Balling," chronicling the "bloodiest" paintball game in history (and that's all I'll say). These two offerings are worth the price of admission, but lucky for you, you get about 80 minutes of some of the best animation out there from around the world.
Austin Chronicle (pick of the week)
-Part of the joy of the program is its all-inclusiveness; there’s room here for the dirty-bird chortles of "Yompi the Crotch-Biting Sloup" and the earnest, gosh-wow inventiveness of PES’s “Western Spaghetti”. At 20-plus entries, the program slightly blurs in its haste and expanse, but even that is addressed in Julian Grey's elegiac adaptation of former poet laureate Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness,”. It’s a lovely, tender short, a moment of quiet in an overstuffed but superlative program.
Austin American Statesman
-The spectrum of animation is here, from stop-motion to primitive ink. Some shorts bask in pregnant quietude; others twitter with such spastic speed that their impact hits subliminal registers. A global survey of a spunky art form that has little in common with the extreme showcases of Spike and Mike.
Austinist
-Featuring a wide range of styles and narrative structures, including repeat appearances of some jail-bait bunnies, a Teletubby like crotch-cruncher and a couple of wacky, half-witted Australians, our eyes were glued to the screen for the full hour and a half.
Columbus Alive
-The latest edition lives up to its track record of presenting high-quality animation from around the world and giving audiences a good time. One thing definitely in its favor is volume — more than 20 shorts are included, the number pumped up by several series of short shorts featuring recurring characters. The program is also nicely light on filler, with several memorable, stand-alone shorts that cater to various tastes.
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