Animated Shorts

D: Various

Concluding with the Academy Award-nominated “Madame Tutli-Putli,” the Animated Shorts program ends on a chilling note: With her wet, red-rimmed eyes, the madame undertakes a nightmarish train trip through darkness into light in this timeless stop-motion short. “Paradise” inventively uses antique tin-toys running on tracks to deconstruct Fifties-era falsity, the gears powering the action exemplifying tensions beneath the surface. “I Hate You Don’t Touch Me, or Bat and Hat” is also veined with sorrow, as a hapless vampire bat faces a gruesome identity crisis. Decidedly brighter was the tumbling, kaleidoscopic “Jeu,” a French import that dizzyingly shifts from geometric lines and forms into places and people without losing its painterly, expressionistic feel. The bittersweet “My First Crush” puts stories of unrequited early love into its cartoonish animals’ mouths, for a few tender minutes. Finally, “Fish, but No Cigar” playfully reveals itself as a children’s story for self-involved adults, as a lady constantly trumpeting “bigger fish to fry” has to contend with literal logistics – massive frying pans, specimens of exponentially bigger size, and rising levels of mercury contamination.

Thursday, March 13, 5pm, Alamo Lamar

This article appears in March 14 • 2008.

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