Most screenwriters would swear on a stack of Syd Fields that causality is the building block of good narrative, and the artists on display here seem to have taken that lesson to heart, building their shorts on calamitous cause and effect, on rose petals and acid tabs snowballing toward catastrophe. The hallucinogen figures in Stephan Mueller’s “Mr. Schwartz, Mr. Hazen, and Mr. Horlocker,” one of the most ambitious shorts in this fourth incarnation of the popular omnibus roadshow, which was co-founded by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt in 2000 (Hertzfeldt bowed out this year, and the program is the lesser without the animator and his pained stick figures rocketing from wounded to scabrous to existentially wrecked). The German-made “Mr. Schwartz …” shadows – with Tarantino-like swagger, time jags, even a kinky red ball gag – one cop investigating a noise complaint, and it’s one of many international shorts on the slate. Other entries hail from England (Matthew Walker’s hat-in-hand romancer between a polar bear and a penguin “John and Karen” and his sublime “Operator,” about a man trying to get the big guy’s digits from Information – “The God. Capital G.”) and Australia (three black comic “Psycho Town” shorts from Dave Carter, commissioned especially for The Animation Show) and Japan (the spastic “Usavich,” tracking two bunnies in a Stalag 17 setup). Part of the joy of the program is its all-inclusiveness; there’s room here for the dirty-bird chortles of “Yompi the Crotch-Biting Sloup” and the earnest, gosh-wow inventiveness of PEU’s “Western Spaghetti” (which reimagines dinner with Pixie Stix pasta and dollar-bill basil) and Georges Schwizgebel’s “Jeu” (channeling Oskar Fischinger, M.C. Escher, and Leni Riefenstahl), room, even, for the occasional dud (the wannabe noir “Key Lime Pie” is gorgeous to look at but a long narrative yawn). At 20-plus entries, the program slightly blurs in its haste and expanse, but even that is addressed in Julian Grey’s elegiac adaptation of former poet laureate Billy Collins’ “Forgetfulness,” which perfectly marries the mournful words – “Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag” – to equally mournful etchings that erase before our eyes. It’s a lovely, tender short, a moment of quiet in an overstuffed but superlative program.
This article appears in April 25 • 2008.