'Tooning In -- Animated Shorts Are Better Than Ever In This Year's `Celebration'

XXXX ``The Third Animation Celebration,'' anthology of short animated films. Neptune Theater. Unrated. Includes adult humor.

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While watching the latest animation anthology from Expanded Entertainment, I kept picturing an army of precocious 12-year-olds drenched in 1960s television cartoon fare. There, just behind Michael A. Kory's Bonehead and John Kricfalsi's Ren Hoek and Stimpy, were the Road Runner, Mister Magoo, Tom and Jerry, etc., planting seeds of a subversion and a love of trompe l'oeuil in dozens of warped minds.

Now, 30 years later, we're getting the fruits of those minds - the mutant progeny of the Hanna-Barbera, Warner Bros. and UPA product that used to fill Saturday morning television screens.

``The Third Animation Celebration'' isn't confined to cel animation, but there is a linking madcap spirit in many of its imagined figures whether they're computer-animated, shaped from clay or drawn on celluloid. That spirit emanates from all over the world: Britain, Canada, France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Switzerland, the U.S.S.R. The U.S. contributed 12 of the 21 films.

As usual, there's a recurrent ``framing'' cartoon that gives the 90-minute anthology some shape. It springs from the mind of M.K. Brown. Dr. Janice Nigodatu (or ``N!godatu'' - the first syllable is pronounced with the click sound of the Xhosa language) is a psychiatrist with an oddly serene approach to irate patients, importunate suitors and panicky friends with freeway phobias.

She's drawn in a curlicue style and her world is offered in brief takes divided by sudden blackouts. Her funniest moment comes when she turns down a marriage proposal from attorney/surgeon/commercial pilot Bill Wallhead, a hot stud who's oblivious to the fact that you can't get to know a person in the course of one blind date. Like ``The Simpsons,'' Dr. Nigodatu has appeared on ``The Tracey Ullman Show.'' She's a sure contender for cult popularity, if not mass appeal.

Other U.S. highlights include a double-entry from Bill (``How to Kiss'') Plympton - a new collection of his brief, hilarious ``Plymptoons'' and a spoof on gurus, ``The Wiseman,'' which mixes mystical nonsense with country-and-western zaniness.

In John Schnall's ``The Reading Room,'' a library patron's coughing and sniffling prompts murderous feelings in a fellow reader and leads to an apocalyptic close. Things don't go much better for Ren Hoek or Stimpy, the cat and asthmatic chihuahua in John Kricfalsi's ``Big House Blues.'' Their sleazy, perilous world - a throwback to R. Crumb and early Ralph Bakshi - lands them in an animal pound where ``the big sleep'' is an ever-present threat.

Vincent Cafarelli and Candy Kugel's ``Snowie and the Seven Drops'' lampoons both ``Snow White'' and southern Californian ``self-actualization.'' It's a neon-on-black tale of a sweet young thing named Snow Job and the seven famous L.A. theatrical agents she meets: Creepy, Geeky, Sorry, Sleazy, Wimpy, Later and I'll-Call-Ya.

George Griffin's ``New Fangled'' is a high-speed send-up of marketing strategies: ``Yeah, but does it say fresh? Is it new for the '90s?'' Skip Battaglia visually puns his way through ``The Animated Star-Spangled Banner'' by conjuring up oars and rams for ``o'er'' and ``rampart.''

On the computer animation front, Michael A. Kory's ``Bonehead'' portrays a vacant type in search of a vacant musical theme. From France, there's Georges Le Piouflle's ``Still Life,'' in which two gluttonous pieces of silverware eat their way through a Giuseppe Arcimboldo painting.

The best computer offering is ``This Is Not Frank's Planet,'' a student film from Mike Wellins and Mark Swain. It's a goofy sci-fi parody with two unseen space explorers quibbling over where they are: ``No, man, Frank lives on a desert planet.'' ``Yeah, well, I've only been there at night.''

For fans of Czech genius Jan Svankmajer, the show's highlight will be ``Darkness, Light, Darkness,'' a claymation work in which a full-sized body blindly assembles itself in an undersized room. This seven-minute film, a tour de force of technique, is an escalating series of visual knock-knock jokes, with limbs, eyes, tongue, teeth and internal organs slithering through doorways to join the fun.

Another striking claymation work comes from Britain's Peter Lord. ``War Story'' gives an audio-recording of war reminiscences a strange visual treatment that veers between irreverent and eerie.

Canada's cartoonist Sylvie Fefer explores the world of ``Personality Software'' which allows nerds to be suave by inserting floppy discs in their craniums.

Soviet animator Alexei Karayev employs the moving-painting technique (oil on glass) that garnered an Oscar nomination for ``The Cow'' last year, and puts it to humorous use in ``Welcome'' - the story of a moose whose hospitality is abused by a host of manipulative forest creatures.

Finally, ``Mr. Tao'' - the latest from Bruno Bozzetto (``Allegro Non Troppo'') - is a small, sublime gem that won a Golden Bear at last year's Berlin Film Festival.

Sublime is the word for the collection as a whole. This third celebration is the best one yet.