ANIMATION RERUNS STILL HAVE APPEAL

During recent years, the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art has presented some of the world’s most interesting new animated films.

But the “Best of the Festival of Animation Festival” program, which opens today, amounts to a summer rerun. All the films in this collection of animated shorts have been screened at various shows in Southern California.

Many of the best films, however, still retain their appeal after repeated viewings, particularly two imaginative, Oscar-winning shorts from Canada. Time hasn’t dimmed the wonderfully macabre insanity of “Special Delivery,” by Eunice Macaulay and John Weldon, or the off-the-wall outrageousness of “Charade,” by John Minnis.

In “The Sweater” (Canada), Sheldon Cohen’s ingenuous drawing captures the overstated horror a boy experiences when his mother buys him a sweater bearing the logo of a rival hockey team--and forces him to wear it. His adolescent melodramatics provide an intriguing contrast to the giggling childhood fantasies the husband-and-wife team, John and Faith Hubley, evoke in “The Windy Day” (U.S.).

Audiences never seem to tire of the flashy stop-motion animation in Mike Jittlov’s “The Wizard of Speed and Time” (U.S.). Clad in chartreuse robes, the artist leads a chorus of cameras, lights and film cans through an elaborate musical production number. Bruno Bozzetto spoofs both gangster movies and reckless gasoline consumption with some absurd mosquitoes in “Self-Service” (Italy), another perennial crowd pleaser.

A patient father desk lamp and his exuberant son share a game of ball in the computer animated short, “Luxo, Jr.” (U.S.), by John Lasseter and Bill Reeves. Like the characters in the old Disney and Warners cartoons, the personalities of the lamps are defined by the way they move. At the opposite end of the technical spectrum, “Tango” (Poland), Zbigniew Rybczynski’s flawed but mordant satire of urban overcrowding and alienation, remains much more entertaining than the lavish but empty rock videos he’s been making in this country for MTV.

Not all of these films carry their age so lightly. The corruption scandals in New York have taken much of the humor out of Jimmy Picker’s “Sundae in New York” (U.S.)--which features a caricature of Mayor Ed Koch frolicking through the city. Ferenc Rofusz’s “The Fly” (Hungary) is a film that only works at the first showing: Once the audience knows what’s coming, its one gag ceases to work. Similarly, Juliet Stroud’s “Snookles” (U.S.) and Marv Newland’s “Bambi Meets Godzilla” (Canada) have become so familiar to audiences that the jokes have lost their punch.

While “Best of the Festival” provides no new insights into the state of world animation, it does offer a pleasantly lightweight summer entertainment and an amusing change from the reruns on TV.

The show continues at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, 700 Prospect St., through Aug. 2.