The Animation Show

Why isn’t there an official touring film series that collects each year’s Oscar short-subject nominees, which most people never get a chance to see? It seems like a no-brainer, but maybe that’s why we don’t work in marketing. For now, we’ll happily make do with programs like this, a nifty assemblage of nineteen films from eight countries, compiled by animators Mike Judge (King of the Hill and Beavis & Butt-head) and Don Hertzfeldt. Highlights include the avant-garde English claymation Ident, and a snippet of the 1957 space documentary Mars and Beyond, a Disney-imagined view of Martian life that helped the space program get off the ground. Hertzfeldt steals the show with his brilliantly funny, Oscar-nominated Rejected, a satire of commercial advertising work and cutesy TV promos that collapses into total mental breakdown. Here’s hoping next year’s installment has this much good material. (Hertzfeldt will be at the show’s opening night, October 8.)
Oak Street, 309 Oak St. S.E., (612) 331-3134, www.oakstreetcinema.org