SHORT AND TO THE POINT

Wednesday evening’s offering from No Festival Required, The 19^th Annual Animation Show of Shows, is a startlingly diverse collection of short films. Much like the Rural Route touring show presented by the redoubtable not-a-festival this past August, this Show of Shows features shorts from North America and Europe. Inevitably, some of the selections on the bill, assembled by L.A.-based animation production company Acme Filmworks, are stronger than others. But far more are interesting than not.

Highlights include the graphically beautiful music video, by Quentin Baillieux of France, for the Charles X song Can You Do It, and the British sci-fi domestic comedy The Alan Dimension. From Switzerland comes George Schwitzgebel’s The Battle of San Romano, a riff on Uccello’s vision of the 15^th-Century scrap. There’s also The Burden (Min Borda) a deeply bizarre musical from Sweden featuring anthropomorphic fish, telemarketing monkeys, grocery-shopping dogs and dancing custodial hairless rats.

From the U.S. comes Dear Basketball, an ode to hoops created and narrated by Kobe Bryant and directed by Glen Keane (son of Arizona’s Bill Keane, of The Family Circus).

Also from the U.S., and worth the price of admission all by itself, is a revival of The Hangman, a 1964 project from Looney Tunes background artist Paul Julian which stunningly (and chillingly) brings to life the Maurice Ogden poem, here spoken by the late Herschel Bernardi, and as relevant as ever.

In short, this Show of Shows features subjects ranging from the dizzyingly cosmic to the mundane. Then comes the finale, Everything, a strange and lovely visualization of an engaging lecture on consciousness and cosmology by Alan Watts, carrying the lofty suggestion that the cosmic and the mundane are interconnected.