If you’ve ever enjoyed the quirky antics of Comedy Central’s Adult Swim you are guaranteed to love Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt’s Animation Show. As Adult Swim enlivens an otherwise humdrum Sunday night, so Animation Show provides an amusing, creative alternative to mainstream cinema.
Recently debuted at American Film Institute theater in Silver Springs, Animation Show offers even devout animation fans a taste of something new. Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt put together this collection of genre-bending films that showcase different experiments in animation. While the films run the gamut from hand-drawn animation to computer animation to claymation, all of them are like nothing you’ve ever seen.
Mike Judge, the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head and director of Office Space contributed several original pencil sketches and test films to the show. One of these served as the basis for Office Space. In cartoons, every expression and movement appears as intended by the artist, affording complete control over this medium. It’s fascinating to see versions of the movie’s characters as Judge imagined them.
The most impressive animated short is one of Tim Burton’s earliest films. Vincent is a pseudo nursery rhyme about a twisted kid who wants to be Vincent Price. Like The Nightmare Before Christmas, it’s completely claymation. Tim Burton’s gothic edge make all of his movies distinctive. However, the characters in Vincent and, to some extent, The Nightmare Before Christmas, perfectly embody his artistic expression in ways that live action never can. Claymation proves a more intuitive creative outlet for Tim Burton than film.
Underground hero and Academy Award nominee Hertzfeldt drew Rejected, the show’s masterpiece. Rejected is a fictional series of rejected commercials made for the “Family Learning Channel.” One is about a boy with a spoon that is far too big and a giant banana. They are completely irreverent. It’s hilarious. All the animator’s characters are ultra-simplistic stick figures who do nonsensical things.
Animation Show resists the trappings of cartoon stereotypes. But like the consumer Disney-whore image that the creators are trying to shake, the alternative and “sick and twisted” subversions of form become clich?s in and of themselves. Though Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt have started an important process of cartoon self-exploration, animation remains along way from assuming its potential as an accepted and mature artistic medium.
This, however, should in no way discourage you from going online right now to look for a bootlegged copy of Rejected.
The Animation Show is at the AFI Silver Theatre through September 17.
