Fantastic Animation Festival (1977)

User Rating:

6.9/10   

Directors:

Dean A. Berko
Christopher Padillo

Genre:

Animation | Family

Plot:

A collection of fourteen award winning animated short films including "Moonshadow," "The Last Cartoon Man," "Closed Mondays," and "Cosmic Cartoon". |

Plot Keywords:

Family Relationships | Surrealism

Cast

Spike Milligan

...

Narrator: "Moonshadow"

Runtime:

91 min | USA:80 min (TV version)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

USA:PG

Company:

Voyage Productions

Trivia:

For her short "Mirror People" Kathy Rose did all the drawings upside down and went from the first drawing to the last (without key poses and inbetweens).

Movie Connections:

Edited from Bambi Meets Godzilla (1969)

You always remember your first...

I was twelve years old when I saw this compilation of shorts and it confirmed for me that animation could be a vehicle for both art and commentary. I had seen Lenny Bruce's "Thank You Masked Man", Bakshi's "Fritz the Cat" and "Heavy Traffic" and the classic "Savage Planet" or "La Planete sauvage" as it was originally released, so I was hungry for the proliferation of this genre beyond the mass media of Scooby-Do. Unfortunately the seventies would be the high water mark for animation, and while talented artist such as Bill Plympton and Nick Park do their best to break into the main stream, animation is still dominated by Disney and their endless string of banal feature films. Given the quality of the last non-Disney feature release Don Bluth's "Titan A.E.", we must pin all our hopes on the Cartoon Network. With any luck, the crazy vision of "Courage the Cowardly Dog", "Sponge Bob", and the often brilliant "Power Puff Girls" and "Dexter's Laboratory" will once again bring us animated features that match up to classics represented in the "Fantastic Animation Festival".