After a two-year hiatus, the ANIMATION SHOW OF SHOWS returns to the Quad Cinema in New York City, December 30. This 22nd edition comprises 10 films—nine recent, along with one restored classic—which deal with both the anxieties and hopes of a world faced with a seemingly endless series of existential crises. All are inventive, their tone ranges from the whimsical to the profound; their techniques, from stop-motion to hand-drawn to computer-aided. The nine new films come from Europe, Asia, and North America. The program culminates with a striking restored 4K digital remaster by the Academy Film Archive of Frederic Back’s classic 1987 Oscar-winner, “The Man Who Planted Trees.”

Beyond Noh

3m 55s, 1.78, color, Stop Motion Animation, No dialogue, US & Japan, 2020

Set to a driving percussive score, “Beyond Noh” rhythmically shows us 3475 masks in under four minutes, creating a constantly mutating, almost dancing image — moving from Japanese Noh masks to a variety of tribal ritual masks and on to every possible Halloween mask, from Guy Fawkes to Marvel Comics to the Simpsons.

World Premiere: Tribeca Film Festival, New York City 2020

Empty Places

8m49s, 1.78, color, 3D computer animation, No dialogue, France, 2020

Geoffroy de Crécy presents a portrait of a literally dehumanized world. A record player repeatedly plays Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Elevator doors open and close. A luggage carousel goes round and round, a machine spits out tennis balls, a train mindlessly continues its route. But there is no one to pick up the bags, to hit the balls, to ride the train. It is as though everyone in the world has suddenly vanished without explanation, leaving our objects to futilely serve a non-existent populace. Director Geoffroy de Crecy describes his film as “an ode to the melancholy of machines,” and the melancholy is palpable.

First Public Performance: Annecy International Animation Festival, 2020

Beseder (Good and Better)

4m23s, Aspect Ratio,1.77, color, 2D hand drawn animation, Hebrew (subtitled English)

“So hard to think it’s gonna be good and better. It’s too complicated. So easy to think it’s gonna be bad and worse.” So goes Tova Gertner’s graceful, melancholy waltz. Director Gil Alkabetz presents us with a series of surreal vignettes, invoking famous works by (among others) Picasso, Dali, Magritte, Duchamp, and Saul Steinberg. Many involve distortions of the human form, in the manner of Bill Plympton, the result is unsettling (even when funny), bemoaning the human tendency toward pessimism.

First Public Performance: Animix Festival, Israel 2021

Zoizoglyphe

7m44s, minimal color, 2D hand drawn animation, France, 2021

This wildly inventive short is the work of Jeanne Apergis, who was born in 2000. A bunch of little bird-like figures pop up on screen. They organize themselves into phalanxes; one outlier joins them, setting off a chain reaction that drives them across the screen. Their movements generate the soundtrack. As they cascade, there is the illusion of watching an optical representation of the sound.

First Public Performance: Annecy International Animation Festival 2021

Rain (Deszcz)

5m13s, 1.78, color, 2D Hand Drawn Animation, no dialogue, Poland, 2020

A man stands on the roof of an impossibly tall skyscraper, having a smoke. Someone playfully sneaks up behind him, so startling him that he falls off the roof. This humans-as-lemmings scenario can be read any number of ways, all of them damning views of human nature.

First public performance: Annecy International Animation Festival 2019

Average Happiness

7m03s, 1.78, color, 2D Hand Drawn Animation, No dialogue, Switzerland, 2019

A statistics professor is delivering a very dry lecture on “Introductory Econometrics for Finance 1 & 7,” using “average happiness” as an example. It’s so dry that the graphs he’s explaining seem to get bored. Working from found footage, director Maja Gehrig alternately connects and disconnects the images from the real-world aspects they are meant to convey. “I took them out of their context to give a new context in my film.” Joy Frempong’s music and Peter Bräker’s sound-design make the diagram-world real and buoyantly express the mood of the diagrams.

First Public Presentation: DOK Leipzig, Germany 2019

Aurora

5m15s,1.77, color, 2D hand drawn animation, US, 2020.

Director Jo Meuris’s “Aurora” has the simplest of stories: Jojo is a pig-tailed little girl who falls in love with a horse named Aurora. When Aurora moves away, Jojo’s heart is broken. But, after a while, another horse comes into her life, and, while he’s definitely not Aurora, the girl comes to love him, and her heart begins to heal. The result is a charming, bittersweet expression of love lost, regained, and replicated — with a nod to the ways in which our lost loves live on in our memories and dreams.

First Public Screening: University Video and Film Association Conference July 2020

Yes-People (Já fólkið)

8m35s,1.77, color, 3D computer graphics animation, Iceland, 2019

In this Oscar-nominated short, Gísli Darri Halldórsson presents a day in the life of the residents of an apartment building, as they wordlessly go about their business…. or almost wordlessly: the one word we hear repeatedly is “Ja” (yes).

As is often the case in real life, these neighbors barely interact with anyone other than their own families. But the thin walls create a sort of vague community through sound. Music, TV, and lovemaking are all loud enough to breach the solitude of apartment living.

First public screening: Minimalen Short Film Festival Norway, 2020

Ties

7m36s, 1.85, color, Stop Motion replacement animation, Germany / Russia 2019

As a young woman leaves for college, a thread from her skirt gets caught on her old swing. When she walks to the waiting cab, her skirt doesn’t unravel, but the swing does. All the lines that compose the swing pull away until it collapses. Only the actions of her mom are able to break the thread and stop this wholesale destruction. Mom is even able to reconstruct her husband out of the jumble of thread. Russian animator Dina Velikovskaya’s film converts the age-old notion of “family ties” into a graphic reality. The girl’s departure is a metaphor for “empty nest” syndrome. It unravels the family unit, which then has to find the strength to reformulate their lives in her absence.

First public performance: DOK Leipzig, Germany, September 2019

The Man Who Planted Trees

30m8s, 1.33, color, 2D Hand drawn, Canada, 1987

This year’s ANIMATION SHOW OF SHOWS ends with Frederic Back’s 1987 classic, “The Man Who Planted Trees,” presented in a striking restored 4K digital remaster by the Academy Film Archive and color corrected for ANIMATION SHOW OF SHOWS at Picture Shop Post by Sr. Colorist Kris Santa Cruz. The Oscar-winning film, narrated by Christopher Plummer, tells the story of a young man’s encounter with an isolated shepherd, Elzéard Bouffier, who is determined to renew his barren landscape by planting thousands of trees. Based on a possibly autobiographical 1953 fable by Jean Giono, it’s a beautifully hand-drawn epic — an environmental plea ahead of its time. As the shepherd’s efforts bear fruit, the film’s palette gradually moves from dusty browns to a range of colors, evoking memories of the great impressionist painters.

First public performance: Landmark Theater, Los Angeles, U.S.A. 1988

(Mabel Pais writes on The Arts and Entertainment, Social Issues, Health & Wellness, Cuisine and Spirituality)