Like Gen-X nostalgia, animation won’t be going away anytime soon. Consider Fantastic Mr. Fox, Wes Anderson’s stop-motion-animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book, which officially opens the fourth San Francisco International Animation Festival Thursday evening.
But the medium has so much more to offer than all-star voice talent (Clooney, Streep) and impeccably tailored puppets from the maker of Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums. How much more apparently is still being determined — there are many absurdly vivid and highly disciplined imaginations working on the question as we speak — but in the meantime this festival has packed plenty into five days.
The schedule includes a live animation event, four unique and thematically adventurous shorts programs, a feature length anime-style documentary, a slate of vintage live-action-cartoon-hybrid works from Walt Disney, music videos for Britney Spears and Feist and Metallica and Fleet Foxes, a renowned local artist’s riff on Jaws, several potent explications of human relations, a few peeks into the secret lives of household objects, various paeans to nonconformity, and at least one weird, vaguely The Wall-esque ditty in which it doesn’t matter that nobody wears pants, as long as they all wear the right colored shirts.
You’re going, right?