A collection of 19 animated shorts from all over the world assembled by animators Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge (the creator of "Beavis and Butthead"), "The Animation Show" is an absolute blast, easily the most fun I've had in a theater thus far in 2004.
They range from silly to deadly serious, and pretty much every style of animation is represented here, from stick figures to stunningly beautiful CGI.
Here are my favorites (in the order they were presented).
Excerpt from "Mars And Beyond" - This trippy 1957 work from the late, legendary animator Walt Kimball is a spooky and fascinating tour of what scientists thought Mars might look like at the time, including many bizarre hypothetical life forms.
"Ident" - an alternately funny and unsettling claymation film about...well, I THINK it's about all the different masks we have to wear in society, the way we're constantly molding our identity to fit those around us.
"The Cathedral" - A creepy and eye-popping, beautiful CG film about an explorer who ventures into a large and strange alien structure and finds that he shouldn't have.
"Vincent" - I hadn't seen this funny and slightly disturbing 1982 Tim Burton claymation short (about an imaginatively morbid 7 year-old) since I was a little kid, and I remember being extremely creeped out by it. Hasn't changed.
"Rejected" - By far the funniest of the group, this is a collection of surreal and frequently disgusting commercials that Don Hertzfeldt submitted to the Family Learning Channel and various corporations that were rejected. All of them are absolutely hysterical.
"Das Rad" - Probably my overall favorite, this is a stunning and surprisingly powerful short, about the entire rise and fall of human civilization, as witnessed by two unchanged rocks.
"Welcome To The Show", "Intermission In The Third Dimension" and "The End Of The Show" - These Hertzfeldt shorts that come in the beginning, middle and end of the collection, feature 2 talking cotton balls that Hertzfeldt loves to torture (kind of like all the figures in his drawings) - they are great.
There were only 3 that I didn't care for: "Strange Invaders", "The Adventures Of Ricardo" and Bill Plympton's "Parking", with "...Ricardo" being the definite low point.
Those aside, it's a fantastic roller-coaster ride of an experience.