`Spike And Mike': Animation Supreme

Movie review

XXX 1/2 "The 1994 Spike and Mike Festival of Animation," annual collection of prize-winning shorts. Tomorrow and Sunday and Oct. 7-9 in 130 Kane Hall, University of Washington. Parental guidance advised; includes cartoon violence, nudity. -----------------------------------------------------------------

This two-hour collection would be worth seeing just for Nick Park's "The Wrong Trousers," a 25-minute comic masterpiece that deservedly won this year's Academy Award for best animated short and the 1994 Golden Space Needle for best short subject at the Seattle International Film Festival.

The British homebody inventor Wallace and his literate dog Gromit, who went to the moon to search for cheese in Park's Oscar-nominated 1990 short, "A Grand Day Out," have been reteamed for this story of a larcenous penguin who moves in with them and turns their toys against them.

In their lunar misadventure, Wallace and Gromit encountered a malevolent robot that looked like a 1950s gas range. This time they're undone by a pair of high-powered "techno-trousers" that the penguin manipulates by remote control to carry on its criminal activities. The sneaky creature, which has a fondness for schmaltzy show tunes and prefers to disguise itself as a chicken, comes up with a scheme that threatens to turn Wallace into a jewel thief.

Like Park's previous Oscar winner, "Creature Comforts," the movie gets a lot of comic mileage out of the eye movements of its clay-animated figures, as well as the oddball voices Park picks to provide them with thoughts.

"The Wrong Trousers" isn't the whole show here. The rest of the program is pretty terrific, too.

Scott Norlund and Mark Osborne's hilarious four-minute send-up of "Jurassic Park" uses "Weird Al" Jankovic's parody of Jimmy Webb's "MacArthur Park" to accompany images of a decapitated Barney, a flossing T-Rex and a distraught-looking Steven Spielberg yelling "cut" while fleeing from dinosaurs that don't look at all digitized.

Bonnie Leick's droll three-minute cartoon, "Better Than Grass," about thrill-happy cattle who develop an electrifying new habit, assures us that "no animals were harmed in the making of this film." Joanna Quinn's "Britannia" wickedly satirizes the colonial aspirations of the British Empire in five succinct minutes. Sherie Pollack's "N'Est-Ce Pas" cleverly digests the making of a dog-food commercial. Jeremy Canton's "Rock, Paper, Scissors" wryly dramatizes a romantic triangle involving office supplies, while Mike Mitchell's "Frannie's Christmas" doubts the verifiability of Santa Claus.

The program also includes a memorable 1992 Oscar nominee (Barry J.C. Purves' "Screen Play") and two of the four Oscar nominees that lost out to "The Wrong Trousers" last spring: Mark Baker's "The Village," a 14-minute British cartoon that uses a "Rear Window"-like approach to deal with the restricted lives of small-town gossips, and Stephen Palmer's "Blindscape," an eight-minute narrative about a newly blind man who reacts with horror to everyday sounds.

Other titles in the festival: "Five Female Persuasions," "How to Make a Decision," "Pro and Con," "Personal Hell," "Prince and Princess" and "Too Taa Too."

Next up in the Spike and Mike animation series: the 1994 edition of "The Sick and Twisted Festival," Oct. 14-29 at the King.