The Queensland Animator's Group culled world animation for a provocative second session. Barflies, the stop-motion production by the Australian director Stuart MacDonald, about two drunken flies playing chicken with a fly-zapper was absolutely hilarious and is a must-see. Award-winning productions populated this session including: Rybcynski's highly choreographed trick film, Tango, where events are sequentially layered on top of each other in a fixed space; Fleischer's Minnie the Moocher; and the computer animated Joe and Basket by Germany's Peter Scarab. Chuck Jones' melodramatic What's Opera Doc? completed the world tour.

Day Two
The tribute to Hollywood's creative source for animation presented by the Australian National Cinematheque launched day two. The session developed a thesis about the kinetic, sometime slapstick, counter-aesthetic to Disney's verisimilitude emerging from the animation units of competing studios (particularly Warner's) from the 1930s to 1950s. Bob Clampett's politically irreverent, visually compelling and overtly adult Coal Black and the Seben Dwarfs was a personal highlight. Clampett's Abbott and Costello-inspired Tale of Two Kitties produced what I would cite as the best line of the festival. As two cats are attempting to capture Tweety Bird (his debut film), the Costello character mutters in double-code: "I'll get the bird--if the Hays Office would let me."

The fourth session was presented by SBS' Eat Carpet showcase program. Alison Snowden and David Fine's 1995 Oscar-winning Bob's Birthday, with British-mannered humor about middle class and middle age was delicious. An episode of the ambitious 3-D computer animated The Quarks Quandary, by French director Maurice Benayoun was shown, which demonstrated the need with computer animation to have a compelling story to carry the impressive technical feats. The South African drawn animation, Captive of the City (William Kentridge) provided a perplexing closure to the session with its depiction of the manoeuvring of megabusinessman Soho Eckstein and was mesmerising in its sweeping movements of shades and figures.

The closing Sunday session allowed for the showcasing of British animation through Claire Kitson's Channel 4 curation. Certainly, the swirling and transforming images of Triangle (Erica Russell) provided the most compelling images in its rhythmic flow depicting a love triangle. Paul Vester's Abductees blended the documentary with parodic glee, in a film that attempted to artistically represent the varied stories of Americans who have been abducted by aliens. Completely on the other side of the fence, Tim Webb's use of animation to depict the world of autistic children through their drawings, in A is for Autism, was wonderfully original in its efforts to document their altered reality states. The technical engineering of the stop-motion masterpiece Screen Play by Barry Purves is deserving of further viewing as it presents and then suddenly radically subverts our expectations of a traditional Japanese tale of love.

In the finale, the Queensland Animators Group exhibited two beautiful productions: Eva Steegmayer's Ah Pook is Here, narrated by the distinctive vocals of William Burroughs, provided a dystopian description of the order of death. To provide a yang to this ying, the festival closed with Priit Parn's Grand Prix-winning 1895, a quirky, subjective, humorous history of the origin of cinema.