Fantastic Animation Festival Reviews

As the festival begins a portentous voice intones, "Welcome...to the world of animation." The theatricality of it all is entirely appropriate, as the Fantastic Animation Festival lives up to its name and spends most of its time exploring new worlds in the way only animation can. Of the 16 shorts in this compilation, only "The Last Cartoon Man," "Room and Board," "Mechanical Monsters," and the perennial "Bambi Meets Godzilla" are straight-ahead action or comedy, the rest tap into the late '60s and early '70s phantasmagoric vibe with an ease a modern audience will either find pleasurable or infuriating. Fantastic Animation Festival is also a good reference point in the careers of more than a few filmmakers: nine years after Steven M. Lisberger's trippy "Cosmic Cartoon" came his almost-as-trippy Tron; "Room and Board" director Randy Cartwright went on to animate the magic carpet in Disney's Aladdin; Charlie Jenkins directed "Moonshadow" (based on the Cat Stevens song) a few years after he was director of special effects on Yellow Submarine; and Will Vinton's elaborate sets for "Mountain Music" and the Oscar-winning "Closed Mondays" hinted at the inventiveness and level of detail he and his studio would put into projects like The Adventures of Mark Twain, various California Raisins commercials, and The PJs.