Spike & Mike’s Festival of Animation A double-headed
monster lizard wreaks havoc in Gan & Emek’s work.
By Sandy Yang
Daily Bruin Staff
When Q. Allan Brocka filmed “The Happiest Gay Couple in
All the World,” about a lesbian couple who want to conceive
with the help of their gay friends, the UC Berkeley Arts film
student wanted to make a commentary about Hollywood’s
portrayal of gays.
Brocka filmed the eight-minute short with gay characters
insulting each other and making love using Lego building blocks and
plastic Lego people with painted smiles symbolizing
Hollywood’s “watered-down gay characters in
sitcoms,” Brocka said.
“In the sitcoms, they’re so cute and adorable;
they’re plastic and they’re so nice they don’t do
anything wrong, and you know what, we’re jerks and
bitches,” he said. “I wanted to make a film where they
hated each other.”
“The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World” is just
one of the 20 animated shorts in this year’s Spike and
Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation.
Like Brocka’s animated short, the festival similarly
proves that’s also the case for animation ““ that
cartoons don’t just have to be nice Saturday-morning kiddy
fare. In its 10th year, the festival has drawn an increased adult
following and introduced today’s ultra-popular adult
animation creators like Nick Park, John Lasseter, Mike Judge, Trey
Parker and Matt Stone to a mainstream audience.
And the festival shows that animation visionaries are just
beginning to explore unlikely themes using animation that ranges
from the gruesome and disturbing to the satiric and thoughtful.
 Spike & Mike’s Festival of Animation Animators
Raymond S. Persi and Matthew Nastuk presented "Ghost of Stephen
Foster" at the Spike & Mike’s Sick and Twisted Festival
of Animation. “Animation is limitless,” said Craig
“Spike” Decker of Spike and Mike. “What’s
cool about animation is you can do a lot of crazy stuff, but you
don’t see animation done in adult themes. People think of
animation as being cartoons and innocent stuff.”
But not anymore thanks to Decker and the late Mike Gribble,
whose cult following of a festival spawned “South
Park,” “Beavis and Butthead” and works by Park,
of “Chicken Run” fame. Spike and Mike also produced the
pilot for today’s cartoon darling, “The Powerpuff
Girls,” eight years ago.
Though animation has recently seized the media’s attention
in the form of more prime-time animation and animated films, both
the festivals and sick and twisted animated shorts had been around
in some form since the early ’70s. Back then, Spike and Mike
produced local rock shows and horror film festivals in southern
California. Before the main events, Spike and Mike would show
animated pieces by film students. Some animators took up to three
years to hand-draw an eight-minute piece ““ that caught the
audience’s eye more than the main event itself.
The two put together their first animation festival in the late
’70s, called “Classic Animation,” which is still
running today. While less sick and twisted, it still provided as an
alternative to Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny cartoons. In 1990, after
accumulating enough animated shorts deemed inappropriate for all
ages, Spike and Mike put together their first sick and twisted
animation festival and challenged a wider audience with the idea
that cartoons weren’t just for kids.
“We had to battle the stigma they were only
cartoons,” Decker said. “These films were truly
masterpieces with huge artistic merits.”
Due to animation visionaries like Spike and Mike and influential
works like “The Simpsons,” more people are enjoying
cartoons. Especially with today’s claymation, stop action and
CGI, the potential and variety in animation has never been more
booming. It shows in this year’s festival as Pixar (producer
of “Toy Story”) submitted “For the Birds”
and Aardman Animation (creators of this summer’s
“Chicken Run”) offered “Angry Kid,” which
ran alongside homemade animation that looked like they were filmed
by a student animator in a garage somewhere. For example, Brocka
spent 12 hours a day for three weeks animating “The Happiest
Gay Couple in All the World.”
“This year it’s more cutting edge than ever …
they’re top quality pieces with high production value,”
Decker said. “But then you have work by Don Hertzfeldt and
it’s simple line drawings, but his stuff is genius and very
low-budget.”
A veteran of the Spike and Mike festivals, Hertzfeldt started
animating award-winning pieces when he was 17, submitting his work
since his freshman year at UC Santa Barbara in 1995 and one for
every year ever since.
His newest work, “Rejected” appears in this
year’s festival as rejected works from the “Family
Learning Channel” or as Hertzfeldt calls his work, a comment
“about art, commercial culture, selling out the fact that
Americans are advertised to and whored around by commercial culture
and capitalism so much that it’s just become a part of their
life.”
According to Hertzfeldt, the festival allowed his early efforts
to gain a fanbase and are a venue to showcase his work; the Spike
and Mike festival being the only theatrical distributor of animated
shorts.
“The bottom line for me is simply that films are made to
be seen, and to be seen in theaters,” Hertzfeldt said.
“It’s just been a repeated personal success for me to
screen our work alongside these Oscar-nominated, brilliant works
and watch them hold their own.”
Due to the exposure from Spike and Mike and other festivals from
Cannes to Sundance, Hertzfeldt was offered work on numerous
television and Internet series. After rejecting the offers, today,
Hertzfeldt heads his own production company called Bitter Films and
hopes to put out an animated studio feature.
For Brocka, reelshort.com offered the first-time animator a deal
to produce a series of Rick and Steve’s adventure for the Web
site, which will premiere next month. So far, Brocka’s film
has traveled to about 85 different festivals, including Sundance
and ones in Germany and Korea.
“I thought I’d show it at school and my friends
would laugh. It was something cute, something I could say
“˜Look at the thing I made,'” Brocka said.
“I didn’t know it would turn into what it would turn
into.”
Decker takes some credit for creating today’s mainstream
appreciation for animation and inspiring avant-garde animators to
get their visions on film and out to an audience. The festival is
taking an even bigger step towards drawing a wider audience by
partnering with ifilm.com, where the animated shorts are shown via
the Internet.
“It’s time to get this stuff out there,”
Decker said.
FILM: Spike and Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of
Animation is showing at midnight every Friday and Saturday until
Dec. 16 at the Laemmle’s Sunset Theatre located at 8000
Sunset Blvd. in West Hollywood. Tickets are $8. 18 and over. For
more information, log on at www.spikeandmike.com.