The Animation Show Volume 3

The Animation Show was founded in 2003 when Mike Judge (Beavis And Butthead) and cult animator Don Hertzfeldt (Rejected) joined forces to bring animated film out of the internet dungeon and back into theatres. They created a touring program of animated shorts that has found a home and a cult audience on DVD. As one might expect from a line-up compiled by two subversive comedic voices, there is an emphasis on bizarre and hilarious shorts in this collection, but don’t worry, there are still plenty experimental clips to appeal to the art crowd. Judge and Hertzfeldt have always used The Animation Show as a means of giving exposure to the finest animated shorts around and this third volume is no exception. It features 17 shorts as varied as PES’s stop motion recreation of classic arcade games using actual food (Game Over), Bill Plympton’s hand drawn silent film noir (Shuteye Hotel), Mike Judge’s brief Beavis and Butthead reunion and Hertzfeldt’s meditation on life via stick figure drawings (Everything Will Be OK). Every spectrum of animation is covered, from the avant garde to simple comedies founded on poo jokes. It’s a wonderful collection that highlights the versatility of an underappreciated art form. The DVD comes with a smattering of special features but nothing that’s too impressive. Directors Gaelle Denis, Max Halter and Joanna Quin all provide short but enlightening video interviews, while every other director is represented with a brief text interview. There’s also an animatic for one of the shorts and a few trailers. Hardly a mountain of extras, but strong ones nonetheless. It has taken a few years for Mike Judge and Don Hetzfeldt to release a new Animation Show DVD but fortunately this collection lives up to the high standards set by their previous discs. The Animation Show: Volume 3 is a must-own for any animation junkie and proves that the cartoon medium is capable of so much more than pop culture comedy, gratuitous violence and mindless children’s entertainment (even if it does those things so well).