Wit Overshadows Technique at Festival of Animation

If you head for “Spike & Mike’s 1997 Festival of Animation” with visions of Betty Boop dancing in your head, be warned: They don’t make cartoons like they used to.

Opening today at the Nuart, this year’s animation survey comprises 14 shorts, only five of which use pen and ink. Whereas mainstream animation has come to be dominated by the brightly bland Disney style, underground animation is in the grip of clay animation, a technique combining clay figures and stop-action photography.

Anyone familiar with work by giants of animation such as Max and Dave Fleischer, Tex Avery or Chuck Jones must be forgiven for dismissing clay animation as strictly for amateurs. During the ‘30s, one recalls, the Fleischer brothers took animation to unprecedented heights with the creation of Betty Boop and Popeye the sailor, characters who resided in a hallucinatory universe that was truly amazing. The astonishing thing about Fleischer cartoons was the detail and depth of field; you could look far into their picture plane and discover all manner of things happening simultaneously, because every inch of the image was alive.

Only one short at the Nuart, British artist Karen Kelly’s “Stressed,” aspires to that degree of visual complexity--and she pulls it off, too. A cautionary tale about the pace of modern life, “Stressed” is a stunning montage of fluid, washy drawings that flicker by at an accelerating pace.

Three more shorts get high marks, but they succeed on wit rather than technical virtuosity. “Political Correction,” a drawn short created at Cal Arts by Steve Fonti, is a hilarious sendup of the effects of political correctness on language: Refer to your dog as a “canine American,” Fonti advises, lest he bite you on the leg.

Russian artist louriy Tcherenkov’s “The Great Migration,” the story of a bird who loses his flock while flying south for the winter, derives its charm from the humor in Tcherenkov’s drawings. His birds are ungainly creatures who are just as confused as the humans on the ground below them, and they flap their wings frantically in order to stay aloft.

Acing the clay animation division is British animator Nick Parks’ Oscar-winning “A Close Shave.” One in a series of adventures starring crackpot inventor Wallace and his dog Gromit, “A Close Shave” is infused with a loopy brilliance that puts one in mind of Jay Ward, the great American who gave us “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” Park gets the clenched-jaw elocution peculiar to the British just right, and the idea of a detective story about sheep rustling in the heart of London--and a heroic lamb who trots around in a hand-knit sweater trimmed in pink--is so deliriously ridiculous you’re willing to overlook the fact that clay animation moves with the jerky artificiality of a video game.

Also notable for its humor is Anthony Hodgson’s “Hilary,” a clay animation short that would work just as well as a spoken word radio drama; it’s the voice-over monologue rather than the images that pull you into this story. Notable for their creepiness are clay animation shorts “Trainspotter” (about a blind man), “Barflies” (about drunk flies) and “Stiffy” (about a dead dog). The chance of a cartoon about a dead dog being amusing isn’t good, and Canadian filmmaker Brian McPhail falls far short of the task.

* “Spike & Mike’s 1997 20th Anniversary Festival of Animation” through Thursday at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West L.A. Show times nightly at 4:45, 7:15 and 9:45; Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:15 p.m. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes. Unrated. Times guidelines: fine for general audiences. Information: (310) 478-6379.