Animate this, mother-ufckers!

My childhood was dominated by cartoons. Light, humorous, adventurous, and while often preachy, they didn't ask to much of me in the higher thought processes. (And considering the early morning, or post-school time slot, the simpler the message, the better.) I loved 'em. Gimme more. Adventure, other planets, other realities, more than I could imagine and then some. They were so innocent.

And then I grew up. And so did my animation.

For years, decades even, mass-market animation meant Disney or Warner Brothers. We were fed nice, saccharine, pretty animation. They were the ones with the investors and the names to actually make money at it. Add Don Bluth to the mix and you have sugar-sweet, fairy-tale, happy-ending overload. Fold in the 1970's/80's robo-anime from Japan that was edited and dubbed for the innocent US child masses and you have the action/adventure set covered. Happy Saturday mornings for all!

But like I said, we grew up. And then we took control.

Today, some of the hottest trends and obsessive buys on E-bay are the toys of my childhood. (It's a little scary.) We all grew up, but all that means is that we now have the assets to buy back our childhoods. To take the things we loved about our youth and bend them to our adulthood. Even our animation, which brings me to Spike and Mike. (You knew there had to be a point to this, right?)

Every year, the proclaimed "Kings of Tasteless Toons," showcase the good, the bad and the gross in animation across the US. A trip to the Alamo Drafthouse, a beer, some pre-show blow-up doll on doll porn (not joking....), and we have Spike and Mike's Festival of Sick & Twisted Animation. It's sick, it's twisted, and it certainly is animated. Is it good? Eh,it has its ups and downs. The animation ranges from student projects to established families of shorts like the Happy Tree Friends. You have to hand it to S&M, it's a cross-section.

Awwww, look at the little- WTF!?!?!?!

In my mind, some the best entertainment (in movies, TV or anything) involves classic misdirection. While the entire animated format lends itself to this, I'm talking about The Usual Suspects-type misdirection. The gimpy, wimpy little MASS MURDERER!! For the Happy Tree Friends, this is their bread and butter. They're some of the cutest creatures this side of Bambi, right up until they start impaling themselves on nails, and carving eyeballs for lemonade. Who'd've thunk such cute little creatures could have such problems? But they're the A-side to this festival. The B-sides include Dick and Jane doing porn with Spot, the little classical ballerina Pig & Bunny voyeurs, and the true story of what happened when Jack and Jill went up that hill (a personal fave).

Innocent...

Just because the festival bills as "sick and twisted" doesn't mean it has to be. One of the stand-out pieces this year is Thomas Schoeber's Pinata. It's as good as anything Pixar could produce and has a similar absurdist innocence to it. A children's party, from the Pinata's perspective- whack! EatPez.com provides a short entitled KaBoom, a found-object, stop-animation piece. At a minute and twelve seconds, it's one of the shortest bits in the program. But it's one of the best, with an excellent audio track to go along with an extremely dynamic, yet smooth visual style. Episodes of Good Cat Bad Cat, from Curtis Jobling, takes a Spy v. Spy/ Wylie E. Coyote & Roadrunner/git 'em structure and applies it to kittens. All three of these (possibly excluding the Cat, depending on the actual episode) could be easily shown on TV, as they're doing nothing worse that what I used to watch Bugs Bunny do to, well, everyone he came across.

...and Evil

Of course, the festival IS billed as sick and twisted, so we really have to sell it. For the gore-lovers, there's Chris Kasten's Magic. Which Made. Me. Squirm. Something about squeezing a bloody, dead rabbit out of a severed... ew, never mind, I'm pretty sure you get the general idea. This year's installment of No Neck Joe seems really tame if innuendo-filled, until you realize it comes from Craig McCracken. Yes, that Craig McCracken- you know, Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab.... yeah, you'll never look at the Professor the same way again. ("Girls, oh girls! Time for bed now!") You get to Learn Self Defense from Chris Harding, and wonder if he's been giving lessons to the US Dept. of Defense on the side. And Mike Bloom introduces you to The Zit. (I don't really need to explain this one, do I?)

A Lone Disappointment

While some of the shorts just made me fall out of my seat laughing, some made me uncomfortable, and others just had me laughing out of sheer confusion, only one left me asking, "Why am I sitting through this?". One of the top billed pieces was a nine-minute piece by Brad Ableson. Combining traditional animation with live action, Save Virgil includes the voice talent of Adam Corolla and special appearances by porn-star Ginger Lynn and Gary Coleman. (Yeah, there was my first clue.) The animation itself was OK, but the live-action integration was shoddy- someone should have worked with the actors more on proper sight lines and looking at thin air right next to your face. Everyone seemed to be focusing through Virgil to, what, the X on the wall? The plot had potential, Gary Coleman could have been played for more laughs, but the overall execution was just...meh. It was like watching the bastard child of Family Guy's Stewie and Baby Herman from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (admittedly, according to an interview WFRR? was an inspiration for Virgil) telling the meandering story of his life. Pointless and mercifully short. No one seemed to care, not even the extras in the back of the shot. (Ohh, look the camera's on me- time to wave now!) I'm sure somewhere, some die-hard fan of The Man Show saw this and thought it was the funniest thing in ages, but I didn't, and neither did most of the people in the theatre.

I'm told it's not the best presentation to come out ot the Spike and Mike pantheon in recent years, but on the whole it was pretty entertaining. I'd recommend it, at any rate. Hey, any show where you get to see a cute little squirrel's face ripped off by a plank of wood has got to be worth something, right?