Movie Reviews : ‘Cutting Edge’ Spotlights Australian Animators

“The Cutting Edge,” an uneven program of short films screening at UCLA Sunday in the “Back of Beyond” series, offers an interesting, but ultimately unsatisfying, look at the work of several Australian independent animators.

The films have an undeniable raw energy, but they lack technical polish and rarely go beyond the level of student work. Ideas tend to be more stimulating than execution, and uniform pacing, crude animation and poor timing rob interesting premises of their potential impact.

Cat-lovers will probably enjoy John Taylor’s “Trevor Island” and “The Adventures of Trevor, a Cat,” which feature an almost spherical green feline who makes Garfield look like a spokesman for Weight Watchers. Taylor strives for the blithe absurdity of Richard Conde’s “The Big Snit” (Canada), but he never attains that kind of freewheeling fun, and the resolutely flat voice track quickly cloys.

The stop-motion monsters that inhabit “Crust” and “Germ of an Idea” suggest the work of the Brothers Quay (England), but director John Hughes lacks the technical sophistication and filmic sense that give the Quays’ nightmares their chilling vitality. Hughes’ creatures remain moving collages of odd junk, rather than comprehnesible characters. The audience has no idea why they continually fuss at each other, and the overall effect is like overhearing a family quarrel in a foreign language.

Bruce Currie mixes animation with live action in “One Potato Moor,” a dialogue between a scarecrow and a pig in a potato patch. The simple story suggests a children’s film, but the ugly character masks and dark tone would terrify most young viewers. Dennis Tupicoff satirizes television violence in “Dance of Death,” but ends up creating images even more vulgar and tasteless than the quiz shows and action/adventure series he attempts to spoof.

The most satifying film in the program is “Pleasure Domes.” Maggie Fooke blends water color drawings with archival photographs to evoke the beauty of St. Kilda Beach in Melbourne. But her brooding meditation is darkened by a melancholy resentment of the commercial developers who stripped that beauty of its spiritual base to produce a generic seaside resort, indistinguishable from countless others.

“The Cutting Edge” suggests that Australian animators lag far behind their live action counterparts in the basic techniques of cinematic storytelling. Some of these artists--notably Taylor and Fooke--may produce significant work in the future, but at this point, their films offer more promise than entertainment.

“The Cutting Edge” screens at 7:30 p.m. Sunday in room 1409, Melnitz Hall, on the UCLA campus. Information: (213) 206-8013.