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.

If you have the QuickTime plug-in, you can view a clip from each film by simply clicking the image.

The Passenger (2006), 7:00, by Chris Jones (Australia). Contact: Chris Jones [E] cjones@chrisj.com.au [W] www.chrisj.com.au

Ujbaz Izbenki Has Lost His Soul (2006), 5:00, by Neil Jack (Scotland). Contact: Cameron Fraser, Ko-Lik Films [T] +44 (0) 131.553.4494 [F] +44.(0).131.553.2828 [E] Cameron@kolik.co.uk

Cranium Theater (2006), 6:45, by Jason D. Sandri. Contact: Jason D. Sandri [E] jasonsandri@gmail.com [W] www.jasonsandri.com

Ballad of Mary Slade (2006), 3:36, by Robin Fuller (U.K.). Robin Fuller [T[ +447986512135 [E] theartknife@yahoo.co.uk

Pika Pika (The Lightning Doodle Projects) (2006) 4:00, by Takeshi Nagata and Kazue Monno (Japan). Contact: Tochka Factory, 22.9-5-1 Simorenjaku, Mitaka-city, Tokyo, Japan 181-0013 [T] +81 (0) 422.43.7741

It ain’t Antonioni: Music makes the beast a savage in The Passenger. © Chris Jones.

The Passenger
It's hard for a major studio to make a short film without someone noticing. Even Little Matchgirl, the garage-built secret weapon to complement Disney's living-room showpieces of Chicken Little, et. al., had a budget. It was tiny, but there were check stubs, and friends told friends they were making it. So when I saw The Passenger unfold before my eyes at a recent L.A. screening, my first thought was -- hey, I know I'm mostly out of the loop in this business, but is this some sub rosa Sony Pictures Imageworks project they're unveiling at the last minute to shock and awe the Oscar crowd? For this was without a doubt a product of studio largesse. The production values screamed it. The whole short screamed it.

The Passenger is a scream, and it contains a lot of screaming, and I shouldn't delve much past the setup. It's your basic suburb, maybe a historic district, with lots of big hundred-year-old fenced-in houses set back from the street. It was sunny, but now there's a storm coming in, with big gray bulges under an anvil of approaching rain. Wind stirs the branches of trees lining the street, trees whose bright colors fade as the sun goes away, and, down the sidewalk through a whirl of leaves comes Guy With Book. I say "Guy" but although the limbs match us humans, the head is not that of your typical guy or gal but an idea of Head with two huge eyes on a, um, shape. In a short full of props and textures of astonishing verisimilitude, Guy's face is a welcome cartooney curveball.

Anyway Guy has a book, a cassette player with headphones, and an umbrella. He's walking down the sidewalk and trying to avoid flying leaves and runaway newspapers and concentrate on his paperback thriller, titled, The Passenger. He does put it away long enough, however, to peek through a wooden fence when he gets to the house where Angus lives. Angus isn't in his doghouse, but as the Guy peeks through the knothole in the fence he can see his Angus' dog toys strewn about. Angus lives by the bus stop, and Guy pops open his umbrella and goes back to his book while he waits for the bus to arrive. Then Angus appears, barking like some rabid hell-beast from the planet of Great Hunger And Boredom And No Dog Chews. Guy takes two deliberate steps away from the fence.

His bus comes, and he gets on, leaving the barking, barking, barking dog behind. He reads. His eyes wander momentarily. There's something next to him on the seat. It's a fish in a plastic baggie. Guy looks around. Guy is alone on this bus. He regards the fish. The fish burps a bubble of air. Guy blinks. Guy goes back to his book, and, to push away the sound of the bus and the storm outside, he slips on the headphones of his cassette deck and presses, "Play." The fish notices. The fish really notices. The fish grows fangs. The fish multiplies its mass. And in a second the fish explodes roaring out of its bag, turned horribly into a six-foot-tall beast of a sort that even the most Satanic-looking of deep-sea Anglerfish would only see in its nightmares. Then the fun begins.

The Passenger is a horror-thriller short animation throwback to the likes of Gahan Wilson's Diner from 1992, ablaze with hardcore Hollywood production values in sound, music and movie-movie thrills. It's the kind of mini-spectacular made by movie heads for display in movie theaters. The giveaway is the music, an arrangement for full orchestra that juts and purrs like a John Williams score in a Spielberg genre exercise. But a crew of a hundred seem to be poking out of every shot -- to take one at random: a simple long shot pointing down the length of the sidewalk with the Guy in the middle ground. The personality of his walk, the attention to the depth of focus and the way the background haze says in an instant that while it's raining here the sun is still out halfway down the block -- all points inescapably, along with a superbly tight story reel, that a whole floor of some well-known studio did this for love and it's coming in front of a blockbuster near you soon.

So what's the mystery studio? His name's Chris Jones, and he lives down the block from East Camberwell Station in a suburb about six miles outside of Melbourne. He turned down a $55,000AU post-production grant, and a $40,000AU offer to use a university supercomputer to render his frames. Instead he rendered the film overnight on a Pentium III for about two years. Dude did this at home, and when I saw it screen on a bright day last November in Los Angeles, that day the studio system -- not just the studio animation pipeline paradigm, but the whole shooting match -- died a little. It's been true for years, but the last scrap of skeptic in me knows now without a doubt: You don't need a studio anymore to make a studio-quality film. Now if you want to distribute one…