The Animation Show

Originally produced through the Filmakademie School for Animation in Germany, this short introduction to the Animation Show welcomes you all to the program.

Man's best friend finds the park a very scary place. Bill Plympton's previous short film "Parking" was featured in last year's Animation Show.

Under the fluorescent lights and piped-in muzak of a Texas-sized grocery store, the Food Education Demo Specialists (The F.E.D.S.) struggle to keep their perky attitudes intact. From annoying customer habits to agoraphobic fantasies, each F.E.D.S. gives us an insider's look into the odd occupation of "slinging samples". Jennifer Drummond's work was previously seen in the Richard Linklater film "Waking Life."

A conceptually pastoral poem-film about the creative retirement of the ancient Greek woodland god, Pan. It imagines his unseen, forgotten spirit moving amidst a modern world.

After a car accident, Ben wakes up in hospital. Not knowing where he is or what is going on, he starts exploring the corridors...only to find that the staff don't have his health in mind! The hapless patient must pull himself together and do everything he can to escape. It's an action/horror/comedy - ending with the wheelchair chase from hell! Peter Cornwell spent years crafting "Ward 13" using the laborious stop-motion animation process, which originally started in the corner of his bedroom in his spare time. For most of the shoot Peter continued to work full-time at ABC TV & was able to complete the film with the help of the Australian Film Commission..

In a digital world, can analog find true love?

One man's interstellar fishing trip unexpectedly turns into the ride of his life.

A first love is corrupted as a man recalls his affair with a beautiful circus contortionist in this stop-motion animation of wooden manikins. At its heart, "Magda" is an off-center parable about lost innocence and the corruptibility of human nature. Visually, the film explores the use of extreme telephoto lenses, creating enigmatic scenes that reveal themselves over time and ghostly figures drifting in-and-out of focus. "Magda" is filmmaker Chel White's third adaptation of a story by radio artist and writer Joe Frank.

In an old forgotten military base far from civilization, a group of deranged military officers nurture their insanity.

After witnessing the accidental death of a stranger, Ruby seeks affirmation in the city around her, and finds it in surprising places. The technique chosen by Tilby and Forbis was arduous, to say the least: first, the basic action was shot on Hi-8 using human actors. Forbis wore a cardboard chicken beak while Tilby shot it. Then the footage was transferred to VHS tape, where individual frames were selected and printed using a video printer, and altered -- beaks, snouts and wings were added to turn humans into animals -- before filming the finished frames onto 35 mm. The result is animation that has a flickering, ghostly quality of an old negative filled with haunting images.

A grand fireworks display by PES.

A vast, beautiful study of time, life, death, and Tchaikovsky, exploring evolution on Earth over the course of a billion years. The Meaning of Life is the epic end result of tens of thousands of drawings, single-handedly animated by Don over the span of four years.

Dark and humorous, this extremely short film features a stream-of-conscious look at the writing process, told with animated images straight from the subconscious... or somewhere.

KaBoooooom!