All of Paul Driessen’s Dutch work has been gathered onto this indispensable DVD, which includes pristine transfers of some of his best known festival shorts. Unless otherwise indicated, all images © Il Luster Productions.

The gentle madness of Paul Driessen is everywhere in his animated shorts — editorial, color palette, sound effects — but mainly it’s that line. For 30 years he’s been honing an affect that at first blush seems positively arthritic. Just watch the pictures move for a few seconds, though, and you’ll see grace, fluidity and tight control in those wavy outlines. His goofy and lackadaisical disregard for the niceties of human anatomy leads his characters to set out for destinations where not every body part arrives at once. His outlines dissolve in a turmoil of gaps. Movement is stoppy and lethargic. But through it all he retains a precision in his timing and a clarity in his largely wordless storytelling that remains impressive in a very surreal milieu populated by medieval dentists, ghost trains and muscle-bound toddlers.

There are over twenty shorts in his resume, some done in Canada and some in Europe. You can pick up six of his National Film Board creations on a VHS called Beyond the Blue Meanies. (Surfers, a word of warning: NFB has a truly astounding number of animation videos for sale, but you wouldn’t know it from their Boutique store portal, where one can hit “Animation” under the “Browse” banner and only come up with 45 results. To see all the goods, go to the root site and navigate through “Find a Film”, “Genres”, and “Animation”, and you’ll be rewarded with a list of more than 1,000 items, more than 600 of which are currently available to order.)

That leaves the discriminating fan still lacking Driessen’s Dutch work, a quandry that was solved recently with the release of an indispensable DVD from online store Animation Webshop. The Dutch Films of Paul Driessen includes pristine transfers of some of his best known festival shorts, including Oh What a Knight, The Killing of an Egg and The Writer.

Driessen has been making personal films since the early 1970s. In his earlier life this Netherlander, born in 1940, grew up under the aegis of a father who became an ambassador following World War II. He attended art school in the early 1960s, which in that time and in that part of Europe practically guaranteed he’d end up in a seminal rock band. However with a talent in drafting rather than a musical mien, Driessen did the next best thing and went to work for the Beatles. Following an unsuccessful stint as a cartoonist for the print media, he learned animation at Cine Cartoon Centre in Hilversum and was drafted by director George Dunning to help animate Yellow Submarine.

The Story of Little John Bailey, his first independent work from 1970, is a stylistic hangover from Submarine in its bright psychedelic color palette and character shapes. In contrast with his later work, he uses a narrator and his cel work is all clean lines and solid blocks of color. The titular John Bailey is wandering through a forest one day when he sets a tree afire to warm himself. The whole forest burns down and the animals emigrate to the forest next door, which already had residents of its own and now is terribly overcrowded.

John mopes in a haze of self-pity until he meets an elephant, Snuffler, with a trunk at both ends. John gets a bright idea, and when a storm rolls through and lightning strikes, Snuffler stands with his back trunk in a puddle and, pump-like, the two get to work putting out fires.

David (1977) is a brief travelogue narrated by the Goliath-slaying boy of legend. He’s smaller here than usually depicted — the size of a gnat, actually — and after killing the giant, David amuses himself by startling villagers who wonder where that voice is coming from. David addresses the camera directly, letting his hair down so we can see him, shining a light in profile to cast a shadow, and tracking footprints from the contents of a spilled fountain pen. When a bird gives chase, he applies his disproportionate strength and delivers a good beating, but a passing man and child see the feathers and feel sorry for the bird, inadvertently stepping on David as they pass.

David is voiced by Peter Bierman, making his first in a series of collaborations in Driessen shorts, and there’s a hint of Driessen’s future sound effects ingenuity in an onomatopoeic “SLIP” and “THUD” that spell themselves out on-screen as actors speak the lines in tandem.