At its core, Adam Elliot’s stop-motion animated opus Mary & Max may well be one of the most despairing mainstream features ever made. That isn’t intended as a criticism of the film, but as an observation; despair is integral to the film’s worldview. In Elliot’s universe – a godless, a-humanist universe of chaos, random violence and meaningless, tragic absurdities – humans create their only real significance via intimate personal connections with one another. The earnestness of one such connection – a marvelous friendship at the center of this story – also gives the movie resounding levels of heart, soul, and hope, that effectively offset the maelstrom of suffering it perceives.

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Having grown rather disgruntled, last week, by the fact that the American Life Network has started inexplicably preempting everything (including beloved St. Elsewhere reruns) with irritating late night infomercials for thigh-press machines and hair conditioners, I eventually gave up and tuned into an animated short that I impulsively DVR’ed from the Sundance Channel, entitled Harvie Krumpet. And in the process, I discovered a minor miracle: a commendably offbeat, fresh, hysterically funny creation that was deservedly one of the breakout hits of the Sundance Film Festival six years ago (and won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short at the 2003 Oscars). Though only 23 minutes long, it has been released on North American DVD, supplemented by earlier shorts from the same director. It won me over instantly, and if you haven’t yet seen it, I cannot recommend it highly enough.

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Ah, fall. It’s a time of transition, crisp air, and distinctive colors; when we replace our cold lemonade and long, humid nights on the patio with hot cider, roaring fires, and violent deaths at the hands of cake obsessed corpses, vengeful totems, and a man eating lake creature resembling a poncho. I am speaking, of course, of the gruesome and markedly 1980s result of a collaboration between author Stephen King and filmmaker George A. Romero: Creepshow!

The first installment of this unlikely hit grossed $21 million domestically upon its release in 1982, and featured five short stories: “Father’s Day”, “The Lonesome Death of Jordy Verrill”, “Something to Tide You Over”, “The Crate” and “They’re Creeping Up On You!”. While each story has its personal, if gruesome charms (not the least of which being the reanimated corpse of Nathan Grantham, whose incessant demands for cake drove his daughter Bedelia to bludgeoning him to death with an ashtray on Father’s Day), the standouts are “Something to Tide You Over”, in which a scorned, sadistic husband played with startling authenticity by Leslie Nielson plans a horrific death for his unfaithful wife and her lover, and They’re Creeping Up On You, featuring E.G. Marshall as a germ phobic businessman who finds himself up to his ears in cockroaches after a put upon employee had all he could take of his boss’s demands.

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As assembled by Mike Judge and his associates, The Animation Show 4 – a compilation of stylistically and thematically diverse animated shorts from around the world, screened back to back – intrigues and satisfies even as it also frequently disappoints. On a positive note, there are wonders to be glimpsed here that redefine the landscape of contemporary animation – numerous ones, in fact. Several come across as particularly arresting. The package as a whole, however, feels maddeningly inconsistent and uneven.

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There’s been a lot of gossip and speculation over the past few days over the fact that, as Anime News Network reported, ADV films has pulled a number of trailers from its website and yanked even more titles from its online store such as Red Garden, Welcome to the NHK, and Pumpkin Scissors. ADV also announced this month that it will be shutting down publication of the major anime magazine Newtype USA, and beginning work on a new magazine called PiQ, which will cover anime as part of the larger cultural spectrum it’s supposedly a part of, including anime, manga, and video games.

Rumors are flying that ADV is about to go the way of Geneon and shut down, and unsubstantiated speculation is rampant. Some forum-based gossip even claims that ADV is bankrupt from pouring too much money into the live action Neon Genesis Evangelion movie, which began development in 2003 but has been on hold for the past three years. That all seems pretty unlikely though. If ADV is indeed trimming a whole crap load of anime titles out of their distribution list, and are going forward with a pop-culture magazine that broadens its coverage to deal with more than just anime, then it sounds like ADV is just changing focus, and tweaking its place in the market. The anime titles that have suddenly gone missing from the website are almost all relatively obscure stateside — not shows that have generated major cult followings or been snatched up by Cartoon Network. Looks like they just don’t plan on continuing to include the hardcore otaku in their consumer base. It sucks, but that’s what fansubs are for.

It sounds like an interesting enough premise for a story: a young Japanese man is stifled by the pressure to excel in school, but scared to do noticeably better than his peers; he suffers from alienation amongst his friends, but he’s unequipped emotionally to talk about it with his family. One day, he just shuts himself in his room and stays there.

It’s the premise for the anime series Welcome to the NHK, which came out on DVD in the US in October, but the phenomenon is real. According to the New York Times, about a million Japanese people – mostly young men – are thought to suffer from hikikomori, a condition wherein the person holes up in their room and rarely or never comes out for years, or sometimes decades.

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December 25th, 2007 will witness the limited release of what is certainly one of the most unusual films to hit American cinemas this year. As co-directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, and issued on this side of the Atlantic by Sony Pictures Classics, Persepolis is a French/U.S./Iranian co-production, animated and in black-and-white, on the theme of political dissidence. If that alone doesn’t indicate the film’s intended audience, let me be clearer: we’ve seen a number of non-anime films in the past several years that break the mold on the western stereotype of “animation designed predominantly for children” - from the whimsical avant-garde irreverence of Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville (2003), to the rotoscoping of Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2006) - but this one, above all others, will almost certainly force incredulous adult audiences into a new mindset regarding non-live action material. (Not that Persepolis stands any chance of a mainstream release - it looks far too idiosyncratic for that).

As adapted from Satrapi’s popular autobiographical graphic novel, the film dramatizes the tale of a young Iranian girl persecuted for vocalizing her iconoclastic beliefs during the Iranian revolution. The simplistic quality of the animation gives it a stark, foreboding quality and a lyrical asceticism that makes the trailer supremely haunting.

Now comes the sticky part. Evidently two versions of this film exist - an original French-language version sporting the vocal talents of such European superstars as Catherine Deneuve and Danielle Darrieux (the grand dame of French Cinema, who just celebrated her 90th birthday), and a re-looped version with the said actresses reprising their roles in English, plus the added voices of Sean Penn, Iggy Pop and Gena Rowlands. It remains to be seen if Sony will release two versions in the U.S., one with a French language audio track and English subtitles, but frankly, I’m unsure what the point is of avoiding subtitles. After all, it isn’t as if the crowd that would frequent this film is unaccustomed to reading subtitles, and the use of foreign language looks as if it may add to the film’s effect by imbuing it with an alien quality.

At least Sony had the wisdom and intelligence to pick this up - and because it constitutes France’s official selection for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2008, it may clock in as one of the rare animated contenders for that Oscar in the history of the Academy.

Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone, the latest edition to every otaku’s favorite mindf*#k franchise, came out in September in Japan to the tune of about $14 million US, making it the top grossing Evangelion film out of the three that have been released over the past ten years. For those unschooled in Neon Genesis Evangelion, it’s an anime franchise birthed in 1995 with a 26 episode TV series about a small group of teenagers who face painful past traumas while piloting giant robots to battle earth-threatening monsters. But the thing about Evangelion is that it’s one of those instances where it’s “not really about that.” It’s actually an arty, philosophical treatise on the loneliness of humanity’s inherent separateness, imparted partly through a conventional story, and partly through an otherwise incomprehensibly heavy use of religious symbolism. And, towards the very end, it gives up the traditional narrative altogether in favor of a seizure-inducing abstraction, edited together in a frantically nonlinear style.

That mostly indiscernible ending was the reason all the movies thus far were made: to retell key parts of the story and provide the literal ending to the series, since it wasn’t at all clear from the wild allegorical imagery that comprised those last few episodes what actually happened to the characters. Also, according to urban legend, the studio received death threats for airing an ending that was so bewildering, even by anime standards. Anyway, the four-part film series that Evangelion 1.0 is planned to spearhead is called Rebuild of Evangelion, and its aim is to — you guessed it — retell the story of the original series. This first film roughly comprises episodes 1-6.

This seems a little weird to me, but apparently not to Japanese fans, who paid generously to prove their satisfaction with the movie. Word on the street is that Rebuild is meant to simplify that death-threat-inspiringly complex story for new fans, and offer more impressive visual effects than the original budget could afford. This would indeed seem to be the case based on the trailer, which doesn’t appear to include any new footage at all, and on early reviews, which confirm that each frame is essentially taken shot-for-prettier-shot from the show. I guess maybe a franchise that tackles such complicated stuff doesn’t have to do much to help people get more out of it. No word yet on who’ll license Evangelion 1.0 in the States.