Of all the forms of filmmaking that exist, animation remains the most malleable, and therefore, arguably, one of the most expressive. As a means of conveying flights of the imagination, it is unparalleled, unlimited. It is also the most time-consuming, and therefore the most difficult for artists to put their personal stamp on: an animated film, if it is to be completed in a reasonable amount of time, needs an entire team of artists and animators working towards a common vision.

By reasonable, I mean economically viable, which on another level is precisely the reason short form animation is given (pardon the pun) short thrift. This was not always the case - some of the most famous films of all time are shorts - but because short filmmaking is no longer a commercial form, some of the most wonderful and vibrant films made today (animated or otherwise) remain unseen outside of the film festival circuit. Thus, The Animation Show, a yearly anthology of animated shorts curated by Don Hertzfeldt and Mike Judge, is a valiant effort to ever so slightly tip the scales.

Judge is famous for creating the television shows Beavis And Butt-Head and King Of The Hill. Hertzfeldt was nominated for an Oscar for his brilliant short Rejected. Both men showcased their past works in the first installment of the program; this time around, Judge is present in name and judgment only, while Hertzfeldt provides the climax to the collection with a new piece entitled The Meaning Of Life.

The most important thing to note about this anthology as a whole is that it is not meant to be looked at as a series of cartoons, but as high art - which, of course, it is. This is not a collection of trifles; both The Animation Show's curators take animation as an art form very seriously, and they program accordingly. Culled from submissions, festivals and schools around the world, the shorts are sometimes funny, sometimes thoughtful or frightening; all are unique, bearing the distinct mark of their creator. And while the key word is 'animation,' the shorts in the series run the gamut of that particular form; there are works here of stop-motion, traditional cell animation, CGI, rotoscoping and other more extreme forms of incrementally achieved motion dynamics.

There are twelve shorts in this collection, all are worth noting. I'll pare the list down to a few.

The first film is Bill Plympton's Oscar nominated Guard Dog, which is a rather delightfully morbid story about one of those dogs (you know the kind) that barks at everything. Plympton is one of the few animators working today who defies the standards of the process; he creates feature length works on a regular basis, entirely by himself. His style is instantly recognizable, and while this short isn't as bizarre as some of his other films, it certainly bears his sensibilities.

Towards the end of the collection we find When The Day Breaks, directed by Amanda Forbis and Wendy Tilby. This narrative piece, animated with what looks like a fluid series of ink and watercolor illustrations, is about coincidence, connections, despair and hope. It might best be described as along the lines of P.T. Anderson's Magnolia with a cast of anthropomorphic animals. This Orwellian touch results, as such touches inevitably do, in the film being incredibly humanistic; it is the most literally meaningful of the bunch.

It has a companion in Hertzfeldt's The Meaning Of Life, which also is about the grander scheme of daily existence. In twelve minutes, Hertzfeldt deconstructs mankind's existence via his traditional stick figure characters, which he then abandons halfway through the film in favor of Brakhage-esque swirls of cosmic paint and gorgeous lighting effects - which apparently were all done in camera. While those expecting another Rejected or Billy's Ballon may be befuddled by the experimental existentialism on display here, the surreal breakdown that occurred in the last vignette of Rejected certainly anticipated this direction. Hertzfeldt's vision is grand in scope, abstract and challenging; if When The Day Breaks could be compared to Magnolia, then the most appropriate correlation here would be the last ten minutes of Kubrick's 2001.

The Meaning Of Life is the final movement of the exhibition - the intended showstopper. It works well to this effect - but for me, the collection's highest point occurs earlier, with David Russo's Pan With Us. Adapted from a Robert Frost poem about the god Pan losing sway in the modern world, this experimental piece is unlike anything I've ever seen before. Russo creates his animation in natural settings - using sunlight cast through hundreds of glass etchings, or a scroll of hand painted frames unrolling over a country road. I've seen this film on its own nearly ten times now, and while I've come to terms with the technical aspects, I still find the sheer magnitude of the project overwhelming. And yet it possesses a bewitching serenity that both contrasts with and, in effect, soothes the chaos of Russo's technique. This is a film that term papers could be written about, and if by saying that I make it sound dry and academic, that's only because it defies description. It is purely cinematic.

Were Pan With Us being released by itself, it would be more than worth the ticket price. But no, there are the other three shorts I've mentioned, and the eight that I haven't, and they represent an opportunity that should not be missed. The Animation Show is released on a city-by-city basis, once a year, with each volume being released on DVD prior to its successor's theatrical run. This distribution form is probably too limited in appeal and availability to start a trend that would perhaps see compilations of live action shorts being released, or both animated and live action shorts playing before feature films as they did in the Golden Age of cinema - but the fact that it exists at all is a wonderful thing, for which Judge and Hertzfeldt deserve the utmost praise. I hope they persist in their endeavor; seeing these miniature masterpieces flickering on a large screen in a darkened theater is something worth looking forward to.