Skip Navigation - Search the MetOnline

Metonline Logo
Powered by Google

Volume 27, Issue 4, September 02, 2004

FEATURES

Getting sick and twisted

Spike and Mike's animation festival returns for short run at Bluebird

by Adam Goldstein

The Metropolitan

May the faint-hearted and easily offended take heed: Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation is back in Colorado.

The annual spotlight of the country's best and most offensive animated shorts has returned for its 14th consecutive year, staying true to its bawdy and gruesome origins with a menu of diversely disgusting and disturbing short animated films. If you're a fan of animation and you don't easily take umbrage at explicit material, this year's festival features plenty of compelling artwork and plenty of dirty jokes.

Craig 'Spike' Decker and Mike Gribble created their eponymous festival in Riverside, Calif during the late 70s, amid the kind of decadent and bohemian atmosphere only a frat-house can provide. Started as a promotional celebration for underground bands that featured short animated films, the artwork soon took precedence and eventually became the driving force of the event.

Since its formal beginning in 1990, the festival has featured shorts from the world's most talented and successful animators and directors, including Nick Park, Tim Burton, Bill Plympton, and Andrew Stanton. Despite its generally lewd themes, the festival's content has always provided a wide range of animation styles and content, from the coarse to the cutesy, the rough to the refined.

The festival takes place in venues designed to accommodate bands, and emcees donning oversized Styrofoam cowboy hats take full advantage of the expanded setting, introducing the features on stage with a zest and gusto that invites audience participation. Indeed, the shows have retained a frat-house feel, flourishing in the roomy theatres and rowdy crowds.

As for the content, this year's festival doesn't disappoint in its taste for the twisted. Among the featured shorts, there's an animated set of Easter bunny candies engaging in lewd acts with unabashed abandon, a contest between God and Satan in video game format, a series of "Happy Tree Friends" cartoons, which feature cute little animals getting mauled in myriad ways, an elderly woman fighting the grim reaper, and a pair of deadly ninjas who just happen to be Jewish.

Again, these cartoons are aimed at a specifically brazen audience, and anyone with a fragile set of sensibilities should NOT go to this festival. Yet, if you have a taste for the grotesquely artistic and are willing to take the good with the bad, the witty and the crass, the creative and the crude, Spike and Mike's is the animation showcase for you.