The Spike & Mike New Generation of Animation continues the good work done in recent years. By contrast, the parallel Spike & Mike Sick & Twisted Festival is the same-old same-old (the two are both showing at Camera 3 in San Jose).
Admittedly, cartoons are the only field in which one wants to encourage violence against animals. Some day, you’ll meet a vegan who weeps at Bugs Bunny. The animals in New Generation are clearly getting more exotic: octopi, crabs, owls and bears, as well as the old familiar dog. Steve Baker’s “Dog With the Electric Collar,” about the just deserts paid to a miserable little yapper, is gargantuanly funny.
The festival is a triumph of varying styles, retro and nowtro, flat and 3D. Argentine director Juan Pablo Zaramella’s “Lapus,” about a wide-eyed nun drawn to the dark side, shows the uses of flatness, and the results that can be obtained from two tones of black and white.
By complete contrast is work by PES, the phenomenal stop-motion animator whose “KaBoom” maybe the only war movie I’ve ever really enjoyed. Here, PES’ “Western Spaghetti” concerns the preparation of a familiar meal out of completely inedible toys.
The three unmissables in New Generation are:
“Let’s Pollute” by Geefwee Boedoe. It’s clear that Boedoe is a Pixarite even before we see the end-credit thanks to Pete Docter (who played bass on the soundtrack). It’s not just the fab-’50s style of the animation that tips the Emeryville influence but also the clarity of the narrative flow. Visually, Boedoe channels what might be called “the Zagreb Style”: the wallpaper-sample-backed, Picassoid stance that created a psychic bridge between New York’s UPA and the internationally famous animation studio in Croatia, where so many educational films were made. Zagreb Studios put Yugoslavia on the map, until civil war took it off again.
In “Ultraflat20,” Boedoe exhorts a nuclear family to amp up their consuming and wastage; this pretty bald-faced environmental message is still hilarious at 6 minutes, thanks to the class and care with which it is done.
“The Ghost of Stephen Foster” by Matthew Nastuk and Raymond S. Persi is maybe the most detailed pastiche of the Fleischer Brothers ever done, as a music video for a pretty good Squirrel Nut Zippers song.
Lastly, “Cake,” by the partners who did A Town Called Panic, is a marvel from 2002, starring Cowboy, Indian and sage Mr. Horse. It pains me to write anything negative about Aardman Animation, who dubbed it in English, but even a cartoon this small and this resilient can demonstrate the damage that’s done when you cut a film’s vocal chords. Subtitles rule.
New Generation Festival Unrated, 90 min.
Sick & Twisted NC-17; 90 min.
Both play at Camera 3 in San Jose
