TV Reviews : MTV’s ‘Liquid’ a Cut Above Saturday Cartoons

Billed as “an animated variety series,” “Liquid Television” (which premieres at 8 p.m. Sunday on MTV) is a disjointed grab bag of short films, skits, student works and miscellaneous graphics that tries to be a sort of “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” for teen-agers.

Crude pencil drawings act out bits of dialogue lifted from old Hollywood films in “Stick Figure Theatre,” while the ray gun battles, industrial settings and scantily clad heroine in “Aeon Flux” recall the weariest formulas of Japanese sci-fi cartoons. “Soap Opera” juxtaposes cliched dialogue with simple stop-motion animation of bars of soap in a one-gag premise.

Like the 14-year-olds it seems to be aimed at, “Liquid” tries awfully hard to be hip. The graphic styles are borrowed from underground comics, record album covers and retro-’50s kitsch, and the artists employ just about every technique in the book. The results hardly represent the cutting edge of the medium, but they’re more sophisticated than Saturday morning cartoons.