© Manga

Manga Entertainment, an Island International Company and distributor of anime, enters the scant market of touring theatrical animation releases with General Chaos: Uncensored Animation. It's about time another player steps into the ring, but unfortunately, for this first bid, the program is uneven in quality and inconsistent in tone. However, is the intent of Manga's first adult shorts compilation to compete with Spike and Mike's Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation or to expand the category to include more mature, thought-provoking fare?

Sex and Violence © Bill Plympton

The Down Side
Series creator Jan Cox helped Spike produce Sick & Twisted for five years, and she's taken some artists along with her. One holdover I can do without: Tony Nittoli. His one-joke film about a cracker-addicted parrot fails to develop the idea in any interesting way and quickly becomes tedious. (The puppet animator made a slightly better film for Spike a few years back featuring a depraved Santa Claus.) Another one-joke wonder: American Flatulators. The title's enough. Why make the film? The clay- animated pseudo-trailer No More Mr. Nice Guy doesn't have one-quarter of the wit found in action-movie parodies regularly tossed off by The Simpsons' writers. In the just plain mystifying category is Sunny Havens (A.K.A. Meat!!!). In Kathryn Travers' 1:16 minute cel animation a truck full of Francis Baconesque sides of beef pulls up to a trailer park. A toothless man gets out, hollers, "Meat!" over and over, then drops dead.

Those are the shorts I would have ditched completely if I were the compiler. I'd also lose the "wacky cast of characters" created by Bardel Animation in Canada to introduce the show. This on screen audience of uninspired stereotypes (a granny, a beauty queen, the tough-talking General Chaos himself) fairly shout out, "Look at us! We're filler!" The sexy, bloody, funny vignettes from Bill Plympton interspersed throughout already provide a framing device, or through line, if one is needed. They also provide a visible reminder that few cel animators come close to Plympton's level of draftsmanship. (Perhaps Sex and Violence -- the seven minute Plympton short commissioned for this collection should have been shown in one piece just in order to not show up any of the other contributors.) My favorite Plympton gag: a man stops mid-orgasm to floss.

The Bright Side
Outside of Plympton's tour de force, and the wonderfully obvious punning of Beat The Meatles, Uncensored Animation has its best moments when it doesn't try to compete with Sick & Twisted. "There are many films in my show that Spike would pass up," Cox points out. Example: Mike Booth's The Saint Inspector, a wordless story in which a buddahlike figure meditating on a high platform is fussily scrutinized by a whirring, clicking, mechanical bureaucrat. The Inspector, created by Lee Wilton and Natalie Clark, is an inspired assemblage of bits and pieces.