Review of Fantastic Animation Festival

I was twelve years old when I saw this compilation of shorts and it confirmed for me that animation could be a vehicle for both art and commentary. I had seen Lenny Bruce's "Thank You Masked Man", Bakshi's "Fritz the Cat" and "Heavy Traffic" and the classic "Savage Planet" or "La Planete sauvage" as it was originally released, so I was hungry for the proliferation of this genre beyond the mass media of Scooby-Do. Unfortunately the seventies would be the high water mark for animation, and while talented artist such as Bill Plympton and Nick Park do their best to break into the main stream, animation is still dominated by Disney and their endless string of banal feature films. Given the quality of the last non-Disney feature release Don Bluth's "Titan A.E.", we must pin all our hopes on the Cartoon Network. With any luck, the crazy vision of "Courage the Cowardly Dog", "Sponge Bob", and the often brilliant "Power Puff Girls" and "Dexter's Laboratory" will once again bring us animated features that match up to classics represented in the "Fantastic Animation Festival".