An Animated Look at Life’s Darker Side

Today through Thursday the Nuart is splitting its evening shows between two programs, with “The Terrorist” screening at 7:30 and “Cartoon Noir” screening at 9:30. As its title suggests, “Cartoon Noir” is a collection of animated shorts that takes the darker view of humanity and the universe. And what a splendid six films they are, varying widely in style and nationality but of uniformly high order. It’s just the kind of program to please those of us not attracted to mainstream animation.

Pedro Serrazina’s “The Story of the Cat and the Moon” is a graceful work in black-and-white silhouettes that tells of a male cat, scampering across city rooftops, chasing the moon, which he views as a beautiful, maddeningly elusive enchantress, the embodiment of a dream he is desperate to make come true.

The Eastern Europeans, perhaps because they for so long lived with their freedoms severely curtailed, have for decades expressed themselves in some of the most venturesome animation ever made, revealing nightmarish states of mind and emotions with stunning and deeply disturbing images, often laced with dark, absurdist humor. Jiri Barta’s “Club of the Discarded” is in this rich tradition.

In an ancient, abandoned building, presumably in Prague, some discarded mannequins have come alive, formed a family and live a routine existence as if they were a human family living in a spacious old city apartment. All is well until some workmen arrive to shove them aside for much newer mannequins, who set up a household of young people who are into sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll--much to the chagrin of the earlier mannequins. With much deft humor, Barta has used puppet animation to reveal a tense generation gap between a conforming middle-class generation accustomed to a repressive existence in the Soviet bloc and a younger generation that just wants to have fun.

Suzan Pitt’s “Joy Street” is an ambitious 24-minute fantasy about a young woman in a big city apartment so overcome by despair as to slash her wrists. Luckily for her, the ceramic ashtray in which she had been stubbing her cigarettes is decorated with a Mickey Mouse-like figure who comes alive to lead her out of despair. It’s a highly imaginative, if overlong, work in the visual style of pulp magazine covers of the ‘30s.

With “Abductees,” Paul Vester employs a wide range of animation styles and techniques to express the experiences of five New Yorkers who insist they have all been abducted by aliens and who are speaking to us in a state of hypnosis.

Julie Zammarchi’s “Ape” amusingly illuminates a marriage gone stale as a wife insists on carving up an ape for dinner to serve to her sour husband, grown tired of being expected to always eat the same thing.

The 82-minute program concludes with Polish animator Piotr Dumala’s exquisite and harrowing “Gentle Spirit,” inspired by a Dostoevsky story, which powerfully creates a mood of menace as a large, brooding, middle-aged man looms over a slight young girl who may be a prostitute--or his daughter or ward. Dumala creates the sense of bringing the past alive in painstaking period settings and costumes but then superimposes a layer of crosshatches; one moment his film seems to have been painted on burlap, another moment we seem to be seeing his images through a rough, porous fabric.

In reality Dumala painted every image on plaster--just imagine the challenge considering the film runs 10 minutes. “Gentle Spirit” makes an inspired use of the interplay of a darkly glowing interior light and an intricate surface--not just as an exercise in technique, but to express mounting psychological terror on the part of the young girl.

* Unrated. Times guidelines: complex, mature themes.

‘Cartoon Noir’

A Cinema Village Features release. Running time: 1 hour, 22 minutes.

Exclusively at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379.