The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

I recently watched this DVD and was impressed by the overall quality of the animated shorts. There were some definite duds on the disk--the worst of which were THE ADVENTURES OF RICARDO shorts--they were just cruel and NOT in any funny way. However, despite these few, there were so many wonderful shorts that it makes this a must-have DVD. Included among the good are the Oscar-nominate DAS RAD, PARKING (by Plympton), three of Adam Elliot's brilliant shorts (UNCLE, BROTHER and COUSIN), the bizarre but fascinating MT. HEAD (also Oscar-nominated), and some very cruel and very funny simple shorts by Hetzfeldt--and several others that were good but I don't have time to mention. I can't wait to see the next volume.PS--Many of these better animations can be found on other DVD collections. For example, DAS RAD and MT. HEAD are both on the ART OF THE SHORT FILM DVD by Film Movement.FYI--There are, at present, three volumes to this collection. My review was based on the first one. The second, was far inferior--with very little humor and too many "artsy" films. I'd rate that one a 5. The third was very different--less funny but very surreal and amazing--I'd score it an 8.

A collection of 19 animated shorts from all over the world assembled by animators Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge (the creator of "Beavis and Butthead"), "The Animation Show" is an absolute blast, easily the most fun I've had in a theater thus far in 2004. They range from silly to deadly serious, and pretty much every style of animation is represented here, from stick figures to stunningly beautiful CGI. Here are my favorites (in the order they were presented). Excerpt from "Mars And Beyond" - This trippy 1957 work from the late, legendary animator Walt Kimball is a spooky and fascinating tour of what scientists thought Mars might look like at the time, including many bizarre hypothetical life forms. "Ident" - an alternately funny and unsettling claymation film about...well, I THINK it's about all the different masks we have to wear in society, the way we're constantly molding our identity to fit those around us. "The Cathedral" - A creepy and eye-popping, beautiful CG film about an explorer who ventures into a large and strange alien structure and finds that he shouldn't have. "Vincent" - I hadn't seen this funny and slightly disturbing 1982 Tim Burton claymation short (about an imaginatively morbid 7 year-old) since I was a little kid, and I remember being extremely creeped out by it. Hasn't changed. "Rejected" - By far the funniest of the group, this is a collection of surreal and frequently disgusting commercials that Don Hertzfeldt submitted to the Family Learning Channel and various corporations that were rejected. All of them are absolutely hysterical. "Das Rad" - Probably my overall favorite, this is a stunning and surprisingly powerful short, about the entire rise and fall of human civilization, as witnessed by two unchanged rocks. "Welcome To The Show", "Intermission In The Third Dimension" and "The End Of The Show" - These Hertzfeldt shorts that come in the beginning, middle and end of the collection, feature 2 talking cotton balls that Hertzfeldt loves to torture (kind of like all the figures in his drawings) - they are great. There were only 3 that I didn't care for: "Strange Invaders", "The Adventures Of Ricardo" and Bill Plympton's "Parking", with "...Ricardo" being the definite low point. Those aside, it's a fantastic roller-coaster ride of an experience.

-- Light spoilers ahead --This is a collection of original and entertaining animation shorts, which I recommend for viewing without any reservations. There are very few parts which do not live up to the overall standard, and only while watching "Cathedral" I was longing for a fast-forward button. Highlights are the shorts by Don Hertzfeldt, especially the "Rejected" part, where he pretends to show his rejected commercial attempts for advertising the Family Learning Channel and some stupid consumer products. This is hilarious and over-the-top humor, sprinkled with gratuitous violence and cruelty (sometimes maybe a bit too much), very enjoyable. There is also a beautiful French short with music by Berlioz and drawings which look like impressionist paintings morphing into one another, though with a very dark and depressing mood to it. Then there is the Japanese flick about a man growing a cherry tree on his head, a German short about very slowly living stone people watching human civilization inventing the wheel, growing and finally destroying itself. There are beautiful and funny "short shorts" by Mike Judge, clay animation in "Ident", a great piece by Tim Burton on a boy identifying himself with Vincent Price (narrated by Vincent Price himself, all in verse), too much to be told here. Go and watch it, you won't regret it.

Many of the short films screened in this collection are fantastic. The Hertzfeldt shorts, in particular, were so funny that I often couldn't breathe because I was laughing so hard. If "Rejected" had gone on much longer, I might have passed out.The other shorts varied a great deal in style and content. While it was nice to see such variety mixed into the show, it felt less coherent somehow than, say, a Spike & Mike's festival. Expect odd juxtapositions and the occasional short that really grates on your nerves.Much of Judge's work was comprised of ultra-short pencil tests, some of them quite entertaining. The animated test for Office Space was especially welcome.Other highlights:"Parking Lot" by Bill Plympton-- standard Plympton fare, but great fun.("Head Mountain?"-- unsure of title) Japanese short about a stingy man who finds a cherry tree growing from his head. Surreal and well drawn.(title unknown) There's a beautifully hand-painted short set to classical music centering around a pair of riders who transform repeatedly. It's an odd piece, but very pretty and worthwhile at the end.Lowlights:"Cathedral"-- Pretty CG for its own sake was worthwhile when the medium was new. But these days you really ought to have a compelling narrative or at least make the gimmick less obvious. Overlong and slow."Ricardo"-- it *is* intermittently funny, but it's a bit amateurish and vaguely offensive. Features a mentally retarded hispanic guy with a speech impediment. Yes, that's the gimmick.Overall, it's certainly worth watching, but Spike & Mike's may be more consistently entertaining.