Spike & Mike's 1992 Festival of Animation

Featuring 18 different animated shorts from around the world, this 1992 collection highlights the best and the brightest (as well as the tedious and the wholly unoriginal, occasionally) in animation. There are three or four greats here, chief among them the Oscar-winning “Manipulation,” by Brit Daniel Greaves, who uses pixilation, cel animation, and puppetry to tell the tale of a cartoonist's creation that fights for his tiny life after the creator decides to discard him. Ken Lidster, also from the U.K. offers “Balloon,” which at 12 minutes is the longest bit in the collection. Lidster uses claymation in this warped story of a vacuous young girl, her beloved red balloon (what is it with red balloons anyway?), and the absolutely wicked Evil Clown who comes between them (read into this what you will). Serge Ellisalde's “Street Sweeper” is an understated, pencil-and-cel gem: a Parisian street cleaner stands by the curb wielding a broom indiscriminately, sweeping trash, cars, and people into the refuse duct beneath him. Not all of the shorts that Spike and Mike have collected this year are as promising as the ones above: as in all animated collections, the whole is wildly uneven with a few masterpieces, a couple of bombs, and more than enough also-rans to go around. American Lance Kramer checks in with “Singing Ding-A-Lings,” an apparent homage to the talking animal 'toons of Warner Bros. that falls flat on its uninspired face. Canadian Theresa Long's “License to Kill” posits the question “What if animals carried sidearms?” and never really goes anywhere with it. Again, this collection has its high and low points -- and everything in between -- when it hits, it goes right out of the ballpark, and when it misses, it misses by a mile.