Better yet, at the height of the battle and amidst Dr. Light’s triumphant boasts, his arch-nemesis Raven floats up behind him and with two words (“Remember me?”) brings the warfare to an instant halt. Dr Light’s face freezes in terror and morphs into a pale, shriveled skull. He meekly holds his hands out and announces, “I’d like to go to jail now.” That’s it. Sixty-to-zero in five seconds. This short sequence, which turns out to be irrelevant to the rest of the episode, is the sort of unexpected treasure that animation fans go to festivals to find. All thanks to a random, casual surf through the channels.

While recently in Boston I dropped in on Newbury Comics (Boston’s equivalent of Golden Apple in L.A.) and found a DVD compilation by First Run Features called Cartoon Noir. This DVD contains six short films, and five of them, in my opinion, are nothing special. One, touted as “internationally celebrated in over 70 film festivals,” looked like a mundane student project to me. However, when one reaches the sixth and final feature, one is amazed to find Suzan Pitt’s 1995 masterpiece “Joy Street.” Pitt is a masterful veteran whose career spans nearly 40 years of independent animation. I somehow remembered reading about this film, but had never seen it, probably because it was released after I had moved from Boston to east central Indiana, where opportunities to view independent animation in theaters are rare.

And what a film it is, a wondrous tale, sans dialogue, that begins in depression and suicide only to end in joy, vibrancy and healing. During the opening scenes, the animation is minimal with several held shots of a despairing female who lives on Joy Street. Pitt gets her point across with strongly defined poses. She uses colors, shadows and perspectives that suggest depression, and backs it all up with a languid jazz soundtrack that fits the mood. We know before a minute passes that this woman is more than unhappy; she’s suicidal. In the depths of her misery she slowly crushes out cigarettes in an ashtray, just as she will attempt to crush out her own life. Sitting atop the ashtray is a silly little figurine; an animal of indeterminate species and this is the hero.

Suzan Pitt’s 1995 masterpiece, Joy Street, is featured in First Run Features’ Cartoon Noir DVD.

After the woman trudges down the hallway (in distorted, forced perspective that matches her own) to do herself in, the small figurine inexplicably comes to life and separates itself from the ashtray. Some reviewers have called it a mouse, but, in truth, we never really discover what it is. In some scenes, it does resemble a mouse, but it seems to change size, shape and color as the story develops, and I sincerely doubt that Pitt adhered to a model sheet for this creation. He is the woman’s life force, her unsullied child, the joy that remains on Joy Street among the shadows of her soul. His awakening is accompanied by a series of rubbery cartoon sound effects, which continue through his first movements.

The wee beastie clambers up the shelves to the stereo and fiddles with the stations until he finds an upbeat version of Nat King Cole’s “Wonderful World.” The use of “Wonderful World” is inspired — the song reflects not only the fantastic images on the screen, but the perspective of the creature, who represents the bright side of the woman’s psyche. In addition, the song provides an aural foreshadowing of later events in the film. The moment the song begins, the film turns into a bouncy cartoon filled with imagery straight out of Disney’s Silly Symphonies; even the figurine’s fingers come to life and sprout happy faces. The tiny anima descends the shelves and finds the woman sprawled on her bed, her wrists slit. It responds by growing 10 feet in height and turning blue (the color of dysthymia). The now-giant creature carries the comatose woman through the streets in desperation, looking for help.

As he places her under a tree the film shifts into images of abject depression; the dying woman floats in a dirty river, surrounded by insects, bloody logs, dead flamingos and ruined cars. She finally sinks amidst the garbage, her passage over this River Styx complete. But is it? The camera pulls back to reveal she is still beneath the tree. With a tender, sorrowful look on his face, the former ashtray decoration pulls a bright red button from the chest (heart?) of his costume and places it over her severed wrist.

Here the film shifts mood yet again. The button is absorbed into the woman’s wound. Green tendrils sprout from the ground and enfold her hand. Her eyes flutter open and she awakens in the midst of a tropical rainforest bursting with colorful flowers and animals. Pitt has created a counterpoint to the fantastic animated world that the ashtray animal is born into earlier in the film, and the woman’s sense of discovery is no less dramatic. The montage ends with a gorilla picking a large red flower and sniffing it deeply in a repeating cycle, an analogy to the woman sucking life back into her body by absorbing the red button.