Within the world of animation, most experimentation occurs within short format productions, whether they are high-budgeted commercials, low-budgeted independent shorts or something in between. The growing number of short film festivals around the world attest to the vitality of these works, but there are few other venues for exhibition of them or even written reviews. As a result, distribution tends to be difficult and irregular. On a regular basis, Animation World Magazine will highlight some of the most interesting with short, descriptive overviews.

Latent Sorrow (2005) 3:30, by Shon Kim (S. Korea). Contact: Shon Kim, 24934 Walnut St. Room 218, Newhall, CA 91321, U.S.A.

Infinite Justice (2006), 2:10, by Karl Tebbe (Germany). Contact: Karl Tebbe [T] +49.30.6120.9001 [E] karltebbe@gmx.de [W] www.karltebbe.de

Tyger (2006), 4:30, by Guilherme Marcondes (Brazil). Contact: Guilherme Marcondes [E] info@guilherme.tv [W] guilherme.tv

Eva (2006), 9:30 by Martin Quaden (Germany). Contact: Martin Quaden, Eyefoolery [T] +49 (0) 40.3919.0904 [E] martin@eyefoolery.com [W] www.eyefoolery.com

Golden Age (2006), 22:00, by Aaron Augenblick (U.S.). Contact: Aaron Augenblick [E] info@augenblickstudios.com [W] www.augenblickstudios.com

In a staring contest with your soul, pain only emerges over time in Latent Sorrow. © Shon Kim.

Latent Sorrow
Latent Sorrow is an abstract short so in, there's no way out. It eschews opening or closing titles and there are no credits, creating no safety zone transition to tell you where the art ends and your life begins. Starting with flashes of globs in muted blues and browns that look like fragments of a movie shot down the lens of a focusing manual microscope, the short takes all of its three minutes slowly evolving into something else, and only gradually reveals its secret intentions.

Beginning in grainy video with scan lines busting out like black corduroy on the screen -- itself a look that's now somehow period, as if it were video art from the 1980s -- the visions on the screen only slowly begin to include human features. Faces morph from young to old women, heads scatter in blowing dots, giant surrealist mechanisms pump with organic life.

The industrial soundtrack hums with dramatic portent, the action intensifies -- and then it's over. It's a singular experience, beyond language or maybe before it, explaining nothing, simply peering into a monkey-mind of loss like a movie projected out of an open skull. Shon Kim is the animator, and the short is his MFA thesis project for CalArts (smash both his names into one word and add a .com to visit his generously illustrated website).

War is only make-believe by other means in Infinite Justice. © Karl Tebbe.

Infinite Justice
Infinite Justice is like an old razor scraping the back of the arm of your moviegoing experience, a slow-motion fall down a flight of stairs, geopolitics baked into a field pie with electrodes attached. This two and a half minute short is animated completely in G.I. Joes and other large-scale collectible action figures, and it's the first animated short I've seen that is directly rather than metaphorically addressing the messy topic of Iraq War 2.

The piece is a chaotic, inchoate assemblage of random news footage of the war as captured off of German TV, with the audio intact but with George W. Bush, the American soldiers and the Iraqi civilians -- not to mention the entire landscape -- being played by various Hasbro toys and tiny set dressing. The action starts right before the first volleys were fired in March 2003 and carries through to Abu Ghraib. Iraqi dolls surrender to G.I. Joes, blobs of green dart around the screen in a stop-motion simulacrum of night-vision, a toy car burns in the street.

All the greatest hits of George W's Middle East Misadventure are here in miniature, including the videotaped beheading, the scarecrow-esque hooded detainee and the female soldier leading her prisoner around the jail on a leash. It's not really agitprop (too old news) and it's not satire (for all the good that could do in a Dick Cheney world); it's just a simple and highly effective expression of disgust. These historical landmarks don't get any easier to watch in re-creation; but the obscenity of watching this happen in a land of "let's pretend" is a refreshing reminder that, yes, we have permission to be disgusted -- and stay disgusted -- by the obscenity of the original acts, freshly, forever.