The Animation Show (2003) User Reviews

A lot of hits and a lot of misses--but the hits are so good, it's worth seeing

[planktonrules · 8/10 · 12 July 2008]

I recently watched this DVD and was impressed by the overall quality of the animated shorts. There were some definite duds on the disk--the worst of which were THE ADVENTURES OF RICARDO shorts--they were just cruel and NOT in any funny way. However, despite these few, there were so many wonderful shorts that it makes this a must-have DVD. Included among the good are the Oscar-nominate DAS RAD, PARKING (by Plympton), three of Adam Elliot's brilliant shorts (UNCLE, BROTHER and COUSIN), the bizarre but fascinating MT. HEAD (also Oscar-nominated), and some very cruel and very funny simple shorts by Hetzfeldt--and several others that were good but I don't have time to mention. I can't wait to see the next volume.

PS--Many of these better animations can be found on other DVD collections. For example, DAS RAD and MT. HEAD are both on the ART OF THE SHORT FILM DVD by Film Movement.

FYI--There are, at present, three volumes to this collection. My review was based on the first one. The second, was far inferior--with very little humor and too many "artsy" films. I'd rate that one a 5. The third was very different--less funny but very surreal and amazing--I'd score it an 8.

Entertaining, if a Bit Uneven

[naloxone · 6/10 · 12 September 2003]

Many of the short films screened in this collection are fantastic. The Hertzfeldt shorts, in particular, were so funny that I often couldn't breathe because I was laughing so hard. If "Rejected" had gone on much longer, I might have passed out.

The other shorts varied a great deal in style and content. While it was nice to see such variety mixed into the show, it felt less coherent somehow than, say, a Spike & Mike's festival. Expect odd juxtapositions and the occasional short that really grates on your nerves.

Much of Judge's work was comprised of ultra-short pencil tests, some of them quite entertaining. The animated test for Office Space was especially welcome.

Other highlights:

"Parking Lot" by Bill Plympton-- standard Plympton fare, but great fun.

("Head Mountain?"-- unsure of title) Japanese short about a stingy man who finds a cherry tree growing from his head. Surreal and well drawn.

(title unknown) There's a beautifully hand-painted short set to classical music centering around a pair of riders who transform repeatedly. It's an odd piece, but very pretty and worthwhile at the end.

Lowlights:

"Cathedral"-- Pretty CG for its own sake was worthwhile when the medium was new. But these days you really ought to have a compelling narrative or at least make the gimmick less obvious. Overlong and slow.

"Ricardo"-- it *is* intermittently funny, but it's a bit amateurish and vaguely offensive. Features a mentally retarded hispanic guy with a speech impediment. Yes, that's the gimmick.

Overall, it's certainly worth watching, but Spike & Mike's may be more consistently entertaining.

With very few exceptions, it's all gold (***1/2)

[Ronin47 · 9/10 · 8 February 2004]

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.

Superb!!

[ejs1ca · 21 September 2003]

This is quite simply the strongest animation festival I've ever seen, and I've been attending them for over 30 years now! There is not one bad film in the lot, as opposed to your typical festival of animation, in which you're usually lucky to find a small handful of gems amid a bunch of junk.

The other animation festivals that are still around out there are either in the toilet or completely out of gas. Animation as a basic film medium really needs this kind of fresh show right now - if this is playing in your area, PLEASE go and support this kind of film-making!

Brilliant and original!

[Valeyard-2 · 9/10 · 18 November 2003]

In a year of regurgitated ideas and mindless sequels, The Animation Show proves that there are still value left in the art of moving pictures. Don Hertzfeldt's simple yet excruciatingly genius segments hurdle you through a gaggle of shorts produced with love and thought. I was a bit surprised to see Mike Judge's contributions were small, but they are still welcome.

The excerpt from Ward Kimball's "Mars and Beyond" animated film proves how the Disney company could once produce, in just a few minutes, something that contained more ingenuity than an entire 2 hour animated Disney film today. I still haven't mentioned the thought provoking shorts Mt. Head or Ident. And I'm sure this doesn't give justice to some of the other animated segments that deserve credit in this wonderful anthology.

I beg of you all to see this collection while it is still in theaters so we may be blessed with a second volume come next year. Enjoy it while you can!

Great collection

[almondbrot · 9/10 · 21 November 2003]

-- Light spoilers ahead --

This is a collection of original and entertaining animation shorts, which I recommend for viewing without any reservations. There are very few parts which do not live up to the overall standard, and only while watching "Cathedral" I was longing for a fast-forward button. Highlights are the shorts by Don Hertzfeldt, especially the "Rejected" part, where he pretends to show his rejected commercial attempts for advertising the Family Learning Channel and some stupid consumer products. This is hilarious and over-the-top humor, sprinkled with gratuitous violence and cruelty (sometimes maybe a bit too much), very enjoyable. There is also a beautiful French short with music by Berlioz and drawings which look like impressionist paintings morphing into one another, though with a very dark and depressing mood to it. Then there is the Japanese flick about a man growing a cherry tree on his head, a German short about very slowly living stone people watching human civilization inventing the wheel, growing and finally destroying itself. There are beautiful and funny "short shorts" by Mike Judge, clay animation in "Ident", a great piece by Tim Burton on a boy identifying himself with Vincent Price (narrated by Vincent Price himself, all in verse), too much to be told here. Go and watch it, you won't regret it.

More hits than misses, and some of the hits are flat out brilliant

[runamokprods · 9/10 · 28 September 2016]

Curated by animators Don Hertzfeld and Mike Judge, this is a tremendously wide ranging collection of animation; computer, clay, hand-drawn, dramatic, funny, abstract, documentary. You name it.

As with any collection of many shorts the quality is wide ranging too, and personal taste will play a big part in how a given person responds. But the best bits here are quite brilliant, and make this set very worthwhile for fans of animation aimed at an adult audience.

Among the best for my taste: Alex Budovsky's gorgeous shadow-play Bath-time in Clerkenwell, Adam Elliot's wonderful 3 clay stop motion character portraits of his screwed up family members: 'Uncle', 'Cousin', and 'Brother' – all 3 are both hilarious and but also truly heartbreaking, Don Hertzfeld's simple, blackly comic 'Billy's Balloon'; painfully, sickly, laugh out loud funny. But even the less brilliant are all interesting, with only a very few real clunkers in the bunch.

The collection is available as part of a very reasonably priced 2 DVD set, along with "The Animation Show, Volume 2". For me, this 2 DVD set is more slightly more uneven than the later Volume 3, which has a tremendously high ratio of hits to misses. The set also comes with a nice booklet with a biographical sketch on each of the artists represented, and a decent number of special features and extras.

OK group of animated shorts...

[dwpollar · 5/10 · 3 January 2009]

1st watched 12/29/2008 OK group of animated shorts presented by Mike Judge of "King of the Hill" and "Beavis and Butthead" fame and Don Herzfeld. Supposedly the DVD shows different shorts than the original theatrical release that traveled to various film festivals, so I this is definitely not a review of the original but instead of the DVD version but here goes with the version I viewed. The added 3 shorts to round out the feature by Don Herzfeld were fun, the three adventures of Ricardo are pretty bad, the three uncle, bother and cousin British claymation shorts were kind of strange and pretty serious stuff for this medium, which I guess is at least unique if nothing else. The short films surrounding these efforts were pretty good foreign entries but it doesn't make for a complete good film as a whole. Probably the best two were a video game-like entry where the character gets assimilated into an outdoor-like Cathedral and a computer animated entry about cloning. These thought-provoking entries surrounded by silly stuff doesn't make the feature flow very well. It would probably be better to watch a particular artist's shorts all the way thru instead of this weird mix, but maybe the original was better—I guess I will never know until they release it as it was in the theatres.

Good think pieces, weak on the comedy

[dreyerda · 28 February 2004]

A collection of nineteen animated films. `Das Rad' is the story of the rise and fall of the human civilization as witnessed by two rocks. At the end conditions return to how they were before man and the human existence is seen as only one part of the cycle of the world. `Parking' is about a man who has a pristine parking lot ready to open when he discovers a weed. In his battle with the weed the parking lot is never opened. The moral of the story: keep the big picture in mind and don't get consumed by the details. Another, which is a look into the afterlife, depicts the torture of an inescapable eternity. A soldier who finds himself in heaven tries to kill himself, which takes him to purgatory, again tries to kill himself and ends up in hell where he is out of bullets. Last of my favorites was a Japanese cartoon in which a man who saves everything he finds grows a tree out of his head. People begin to live there. When he gets angry at their excesses he tears the trees from its roots creating a hole. But the hole gathers water and people still congregate. In the end the man, who is the symbolic conservationist, dies from the excesses of the people leading to the ultimate demise of nature. Some of the comedy pieces I didn't think were very funny but overall I would recommend seeing this for the above-mentioned films.