Spike & Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation 2010

Like swallows to Capistrano, the return of a new Spike & Mike Sick & Twisted fest to the Alamo Drafthouse means a new year has begun. You can always count on these shorts for more than the recommended dose of dick jokes, exploding noggins, disembowelings, and other animated amusements. This collection consists of a couple dozen shorts, most of which haven’t been shown before in the Spike & Mike programs. (Reuse has been a problem in recent years for these impresarios of the animatedly perverse.) Of course, there’s one of their staples, a Happy Tree Friends cartoon (“All Flocked Up!), but other than that there is little repetition, although many of these films aren’t the freshest kids on the block. Many appear to be student films. Max Winston’s “I Live in the Woods” opens the program, and is a cutely rendered tale that is followed by David Ochs’ “Who’s Hungry?,” in which two kids are snatched by an evil ice-cream vendor. “Skylight” by David Baas is a delightfully lo-fi faux newsreel about penguins zapped through the hole in the ozone layer. The short “Cake” is from the A Town Called Panic gang and features the Cowboy, Indian, and Horse in another of their zany escapades. “Western Spaghetti” by Pes is an imaginative cooking demonstration. The French film “Oktapodi,” by a team of six directors, is a colorful chase story that was nominated for an Oscar last year. “Tittybop” by Adam Ansorage delivers on its title, though wishfully warns that some female viewers may be offended by its content. By far, the two best films come from seasoned professionals. Bill Plympton’s “Santa: The Fascist Years” is narrated by Matthew Modine and depicts Santa’s quest for world dominance in a fight against the Holiday Allies. Shane Acker (the director of the animated feature 9 which was adapted from his animated short of the same title) presents “The Hangnail,” a cartoon he made prior to “9.” This cautionary tale for nail-biters shows how a tug on a hangnail might unravel a body’s entire corpus. Leave it to the other filmmakers, though, to show the blood and guts.