Animation Show 2005

In only their second year Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt have managed to put together an amazing collection of animated shorts for their Animation Show.

Almost every film was jaw-dropping. There was only one film that didn't really belong among the others, and only one film that I'd already seen (and I didn't really need to see it again).

Bill Plympton's Guard Dog was hilarious as expected. Pan With Us blew me away with its creative use of stop-motion to animate 2D in an real-world envorinment. Speaking of stop-motion Ward 13 was funny, exciting and technically amazing. The director of Ward 13 was at the Q&A afterwards and he spoke about how he made the film.

I was quite impressed with the CG film Fallen Art. It was much more exgaging than the overrated Rock Fish cuz it was really creepy and very self-aware of its traditional animation roots.

Probably the most impressive film of the evening was the adorable film Hello. It was extremely well animated, it had a strong visual style and it told a great little story that was both familiar and yet totally original.

Then of course there was main attraction of the night: Don Hertzfeldt's The Meaning of Life. It was very different from his previous films like Billy's Balloon and Rejected and yet it was much of the same. At the Q&A after the screening, Don explained how the film took 4 years cuz he made it without using a computer. While i think its commentable that Don kept it oldschool, I don't think all that needless work to make it on film could really be seen in the finished product. Honestly, why try to reinvent the wheel... just do it on a computer and it'll look exactly the same.

Régis, Donna and I went to Muse afterwards (Muse is turning into a Zono Sushi). We talked about how animation festivals seem to accept certain types of films. It seems all the films in the Animation Show were chosen because they had a certain STYLE. Story took a backseat to style in almost every film. The only film that would've worked just as well had it been done using a different style of animation was Hello and it's because the story mattered more than the style. Even Don's film all about style. I'm not saying the films were "style without substance" because there was a whole lot of substance to all the films. It's just that the style of each film overshadowed the substanced.

[watched with Régis, Donna, Evander, Matt Flynn, Jackie, Sharon, and a whole bunch of other people from UCLA Animation]

NPR Review:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4504367