E-Mail This Article to a Friend " THE ANIMATION SHOW 2005 "

The dozen animated shorts that Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt selected for this compilation are violent, dark, existential, sometimes funny, rarely cute, gorgeous to watch, and almost entirely without dialogue. Named after a poem by Robert Frost, David Russo’s atmospheric "Pan with Us" fuses live action and animation in a sober, silhouettic way. There’s a similar if more gruesome sense of the macabre in Polish director Tomek Baginski’s "Fallen Art," in which an obese warlord choreographs his own animated dance of death. "Ward 13," Peter Cornwell’s gothic horror, is about a man imprisoned in a sadistic hospital. Tim Miller’s "Rock Fish" combines Star Wars and Tremors as a giant cockroachish creature leads the hero and his future-version-of-dog through a post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s more impressive for its animation than for its story. A over-imaginative dog fantasizes about the various threats to his master — squirrel attack, jump-rope hanging, bird-nest beheading — in Bill Plympton’s "Guard Dog." And Hertzfeldt’s own "The Meaning of Life" is an H.G. Wellsian look at evolution and de-evolution peopled by stick figures and mouthy creatures hurtling through the cosmos. (80 minutes)