"Avant-Garde Toon Fest"
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What You Need To Know:
The other shorts were not that interesting, or uplifting. In the macabre “Billy’s Balloon,” a bunch of balloons take violent revenge against the children who hold their strings by bopping them on the head and lifting them up and dropping them repeatedly. In one of Aardman’s “Angry Kid” shorts, the angry child and his younger sister watch TV as a man graphically describes sexual intercourse, conception and birth. Finally, in “Three Misses,” one of the seven dwarves kisses Snow White awake, then hops into the glass coffin with her. Thus, except for a couple shorts, one of which refers to God in a Jewish folktale setting, SPIKE AND MIKE has yet to deliver a consistently high-quality, family-friendly collection of the world’s animation
Content:
(PaPa, OO, B, LL, VV, SS, N, A, D, M) Eclectic avant-garde pagan worldview, with some spooky occult animation of ghosts, goblins & graveyards, plus references to God in an animated Jewish folktale; 11 obscenities, 2 profanities, plus cow, dog & bird relieve themselves; moderate cartoon violence, including chases, hitting, dwarves killed, train hits woman tied on tracks off screen, woman falls to her death, rooster dressed as a man killed by car off screen, & balloons take violent revenge against the children who hold their strings; graphic description of sexual intercourse, conception & birth in one cartoon & dwarf kisses Snow White & hops in her glass coffin with her; rear nudity on green creature; alcohol use; smoking; and some miscellaneous immorality, such as arguing, man leaves wife & kids, & scary occult scenes.
More Detail:
Each year for 23 years, an anthology of animated, award-winning cartoons from around the world plays in selected cities. This year’s collection is titled SPIKE AND MIKE’S 2000 CLASSIC FESTIVAL OF ANIMATION.
As usually is the case, this year’s version carries a couple of repeats from previous years, including Don Hertzfeldt’s sadistic “Billy’s Balloon” and Aardman Animation’s (the makers of CHICKEN RUN) funny “Hum Drum,” a 1999 Oscar® nominee. Other featured shorts include two other 1999 Oscar® nominees, Wendy Tilby and Amanda Fortis’ “When the Day Breaks,” and “Three Misses” from animator Paul Driessen. Other works are “The Village of Idiots,” a series of “Angry Kid” cartoons from Aardman, “At the Ends of the Earth,” “Mysterious Mose,” “The Ghost of Stephen Foster,” and “One Day a Man Bought a House.”
Many discerning viewers may think “Hum Drum” the funniest of all the shorts featured in SPIKE AND MIKE’S 2000 CLASSIC FESTIVAL OF ANIMATION. It consists of two bored, argumentative shadow puppets who decide to relieve their boredom by creating their own shadow puppets. One of the shadow puppets is not smart enough to guess the simple images that the other one creates. The other shorts were not that interesting, or uplifting, however. In fact, in the macabre “Billy’s Balloon,” a bunch of balloons take violent revenge against the children who hold their strings by bopping them on the head and lifting them up in the air and dropping them repeatedly. In one of Aardman’s “Angry Kid” shorts, the angry child and his younger sister watch TV as a man graphically describes sexual intercourse, conception and birth. Finally, in “Three Misses,” one of the seven dwarves kisses Snow White awake, then hops into the glass coffin with her.
Thus, except for a couple shorts, one of which refers to God in a Jewish folktale setting, SPIKE AND MIKE still has yet to deliver a consistently high-quality, family-friendly collection of the world’s animation. The animation on many TV commercials, in fact, is often just as good, clever and funny as most things that SPIKE AND MIKE show.
