ANIMATED FILMS BY UCLA STUDENTS

UCLA Animation: Diversity in Imagination,” a program of recent student films screening at the Nuart Theater today, certainly lives up to its title. The show includes work done in most every type of animation and at varying levels of refinement.

The best films in the program are the experimental works. Mark Chavez uses lines of brilliantly colored laser light to draw figures from the legend of Quetzalcoatl in “Omeyotl,” a striking updating of an ancient vision. Shapes of glowing color move through an abstract three-dimensional ballet in Tony Venezia’s “Revelation.” Seth Olitzky blends mattes, optical printing, computer graphics and images drawn directly onto film in “Flashpoint,” a sophisticated, non-objective work set to a jazz score. These are handsome works by artists of obvious promise.

At the border between experimental and conventional animation are two films that mix media in imaginative ways. Lely Yashar juxtaposes drawn figures with simple computer graphics to depict a child’s fantasy of a carnival in her charming “Circus Circus.” Doug Chiang combines stop-motion animation with sequential photographs in “Mental Block,” a study in frustration.

The UCLA curriculum apparently stresses film making over animation. Several shorts are weak in the areas of character design and motion: The characters don’t look good when seen from different angles; the animators don’t move them in ways that suggest weight, volume or personality.

The sound tracks for “Deep in the Heart of Jersey” by Andrew Artz and “Wild Times in Wildwood” by Chuck Sheetz are more interesting than any of the visuals. Both films could be done more effectively in live action. The transitions between images in Darlene Hadrika’s “Spring Blanket” and Danny Muller’s “Ruedi’s Faces” are more imaginative than the images themselves.

Making “The Painter” and the distastefully sexist “A Brief Affair” may have been therapeutic for Diane Heller and Carol Blum, but neither film is sufficiently original or entertaining to warrant an audience’s attention. The tinted cut-outs in Bridget Murname’s “Tournants” don’t tell the viewer much about dance history, the apparent subject. Do these works really belong among the best films that the UCLA Animation Workshop has produced in the last seven years?

“Diversity in Imagination” screens at the Nuart Theater, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles at 2:30, 4:15, 6, 7:45 and 9:30 p.m. Program information: (213) 478-6379 or 479-5269.