ANIMATION FEST: FILMS FROM AROUND WORLD

The annual Festival of Animation (at Sexson Auditorium, Pasadena City College tonight, Saturday and Sunday) provides Los Angeles audiences with an all-too-rare opportunity to see short animated films from around the world. This year’s collection features both familiar shorts and new works, including at least one strong candidate, “Bartakiad,” for next year’s Oscar.

Oldrich Haberle uses a bold, linear style with small accents of color to create a weirdly skewed world of faceless human beings and animals in “Bartakiad” (Czechoslovakia). This graphically striking film functions both as pure entertainment and as a satire of an increasingly dehumanized society.

Even stranger is Evert de Beijer’s “The Characters” (Holland), in which a man and a woman are pursued by gigantic numbers, letters and graphic symbols. Unlike the illustrated radio format of American Saturday-morning animation, both “Bartakiad” and “Characters” communicate a wide range of emotions through purely visual imagery.

Like his previous Oscar-nominated “Dr. De Soto,” Michael Sporn’s “The Amazing Bone” is an adaptation of a children’s book by New Yorker cartoonist William Steig. Narrated by John Lithgow, the film captures the best elements of Steig’s ingenuous style.

Commercials consistently showcase some of the most imaginative animation done in America, and the examples in the festival cover a broad range of styles and techniques. The computer-generated, marble and gold animals by Abel Image Research contrast sharply with the funky line of raisins performing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” that Will Vinton brings to life through Claymation.

Some of the familiar shorts demonstrate how timeless good animation can be. The subtle interplay of the characters in Paul Driessen’s three-part, split-screen film “On Land, at Sea and in the Air” (Holland) becomes clear only after repeated viewings. Derek Lamb’s “Every Child” (Canada) remains as pointed and amusing a comment on the ill treatment children receive as it was when it won the Oscar seven years ago.

Richard Conde’s deliriously insane “Pigbird” and “The Big Snit” (Canada) may seem even funnier on the third viewing than the first, because the viewer can look away from the central action and catch the bizarre little details tucked away in the background. (Why does the couple in “The Big Snit” have a DC-10 tire in their bathroom?) Conversely, Sheldon Cohen’s “Pies” (Canada), a distasteful tale that blends cow pies and mince pies, isn’t getting better, it’s just getting older.

“Festival of Animation” screens tonight at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. and Sunday at 4 p.m. and 8 p.m. at Sexson Auditorium, Pasadena City College, 1570 E. Colorado Blvd. Information: (818) 894-3628.