Posted by tourdemars to Entertainment at September 24, 2003 12:00 PM

This festival of animated shorts should attract a wide audience. Serious cinephiles will want to check out ambitious, Oscar-nominated foreign titles like Katedra, which recalls Final Fantasy in its stunning resemblance to live-action sci-fi, and La Course a L'Abime, a gay romp in the world of Impressionism set to the strains of Berlioz's "The Damnation of Faust." Connoisseurs of the lowbrow will revel in early works by Beavis and Butthead creator (and Show co-producer) Mike Judge; the festival's other producer, Don Hertzfeldt, supplies several of his patented gag reels—wicked, mean, and piss-your-pants funny. Trust me: Until you've seen stick- figure children get the beating of their lives from demonic balloons, you have not truly lived. Special bonus: an excerpt from Mars and Beyond, a quasi-hallucinatory 1957 cartoon that speculates about life on Mars with enough visual imagination to make would-be Asimovs whimper with delight.