The Animation Show: Volume 3
Not quite what you would expect from Mike Judge…
 By Jeremy Azevedo
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I can vividly recall piling into the car with three or four other kids as a teenager, passing a doobie around on the way to “Spike and Mike’s Sick Twisted Festival of Animation” once every six months or so when it came to town. |
I am just old enough that when I was a teenager, there weren’t really any videos online, so this was the only way you could see, weird, experimental animated short films from around the world.
Sadly, with the onset of Youtube and high speed internet, interest in Spike and Mike dwindled and seemed to disappear. In stepped Beavis & Butthead creator Mike Judge and animator Don Hertzfeldt with a new touring show, “The Animation Show”. Unfortunately, The Animation Show does not seem to be faring any better.
This film, “City Paradise”, wasn’t even all that animated, to be perfectly honest.
It isn’t true to say that the films collected in Volume 3 are poor in quality, but rather that they don’t really make an effort to reach out to the broader audience outside of the art house crowd. While the majority of us have been accustomed to seeing thousands of clever, well animated, funny and coherent films popping up online faster than we can even watch them, it’s amazing how few of these films even come close to anything resembling story structure or comedic timing.
This is not to say that every animated film ever produced must be funny. Some of the films here, like “Bunnies”, a sort of live action Goldenbook cautionary tale or “Overtime”, a trippy combination of animation, puppetry and 3-D modeling are incredibly unusual and creative. But when nearly every film is a high-concept experimental film, you sort of start to wonder why the collection began with an introduction by Beavis & Butthead?
I can’t really recommend The Animation Show Volume 3 to anyone other than film and animation students/enthusiasts or people with a serious interest in animation as genuine art. But anyone looking for the good-time, stoney, shockingly offensive, taboo crushing, laugh out loud animated film festival of days gone by will be sort of disappointed.
Rating: 5 out of 10
+2 if you still have dial-up Internet
-2 if you are currently just in the market for a good fart joke
