The fourth season of The Animation Show, the periodic mini-festival of animated shorts compiled by Mike Judge (with fellow animator Don Hertzfeldt, who worked as co-curator of the previous collections, sitting out this one), has begun its progress around the country. As in previous years, the selection is widely varyied in both style and content, making room for one elegant illustrated reading of a poem by Billy Collins and three different episodes featuring a creature called Yompi, the Crotch-Biting Sloup. (If you think Yompi's adventures pretty much write themselves, we can only say...well, yeah.) A couple of the most pleasing films are Grant Orchard's Love Sport: Paint Balling (above) and Western Spaghetti from the stop-motion animator PES. Both are simple, short, and eye-popping, which is to say they're also beautifully scaled to the computer screen.
Also included is Bill Plympton's latest short, Hot Dog, the tragicomic tale of a dog who yearns to join the gang at the firehouse. It helps wash away the bitter aftertaste from Idiots and Angels, Plympton's latest misbegotten attempt to stretch his quirky talents out to feature length. The first minute of the new film is available at YouTube, where it's billed as a "trailer":
