Animating Entertainment

F>REEDOM'S JUST ANOTHER word for animated films. Freedom for the animator to construct a film frame by frame, drawing and painting and manipulating images, recurrences, and transitions. Freedom for the spectator from the usual verbal transmission of ideas and symbols. Freedom for the cinema from live-action continuous filming and naturalistic photography.

So throw off your chains. This weekend at the Science Center the University Film Study Center is projecting fifteen of the world's finest short animated films, selected in part from winners of international festivals. The styles range from New Yorker-cartoon-like line drawings to color swirls and slashes reminiscent of Kandinsky, from sequenced photographs of porcelain dolls to images like amoebas in a microscopic slide. Mostly, though, they transmit undiluted visual delight.

One film by Steve Segall called "Red Ball Express" gets all caught up in trains. It marvelously anticipates what the spectator's mind expects to follow each mobile image. Railroad tracks cross and intertwine, creating squares and patterns and coils; wheels roll and tumble; all to the tune of Kentucky bluegrass fiddling. Another short, by Canadian Paul Driessen, features little and not-so-little green monsters, fishes, and manipulative humans--the creatures swallow each other in an endless progression of gulps and burps. Perhaps Driessen suffers from an underlying paranoia--there's always something bigger out there waiting, waiting...

T>HERE'S ALSO a Czechoslovakian film about the abduction of a harpist, in which hero and villain tangle, and justice prevails satisfactorily against a stark, nightmarish background. In "Euphoria," Peter Max poster colors vie with Matisse-like cutouts in a sort of Lucy-In-The-Sky jazz visual. A Japanese short which follows uses dolls to narrate a Japanese folktale about two hunters who sever the arm of a demon while hunting, and return home only to find their ancient mother bleeding to death in demonic anguish, with a missing arm.

Other films on the program are more interesting visually, but the most topically amusing short is one by Bruno Bozzeta called "Self-Service," a parable of industrialization, energy consumption, and insatiable greed. Mosquitos in search of a square meal keep trying to attach their snouts to a human's skin despite inevitable smushing. When the human falls asleep, skeeter entrepreneurs erect oil wells and canning factories to the gruntlement (that's the opposite of disgruntlement) of skeeters everywhere. But the human wakes up, and the gibbering insects flee to the sanctuary of a church, where the Great Fickle Finger of the Lord juts down and promises impending doom to the prostrate bugs. But one audacious mosquito looks up, casts a few furtive glances around like Patty Hearst in a bank, and latches on to the Finger for one last free lunch.

Your mind gets lost easily among these fifteen curious new worlds in which images free-associate and shapes warble and trill. It is entertainment that leaves you animated.