'Toon In, Turn On, Drop Everything

Spike & Mike are coming! Spike & Mike are coming! Spike & Mike are com...

What's dat? You don' know about Spike & Mike?! Hey, Charlie, get a load a' dis guy. Da one wit his nose in da magazine. He don' know about Spike & Mike.

No, we're not talking about tag-team professional wrestlers. Spike & Mike are promoters of independently-produced animation, traveling salesmen of the proposition that cartoons aren't just for children anymore, ringmasters of a veritable chautauqua of sequenced film art from around the world. These are the guys who premiered films by John Lasseter (Toy Story), Nick Park (Wallace & Gromit) and Mike Judge (Beavis & Butthead). They brought us the surreal pencil animations of caricaturist Bill Plympton and premiered the first student films of Tim Burton (The Nightmare Before Christmas). And now they're celebrating their 20th anniversary with an international slate of new animated shorts. The 20th annual Spike & Mike Festival of Animation comes to Upstate Films in Rhinebeck November 7 through 13. Don't miss it.

Craig "Spike" Decker and his late partner, Mike Gribble, began their career running a movie house, where they showcased cult favorites and underground bands. Instead of showing Bugs Bunny trailers, S & M opened their shows with Max Fleischer's Betty Boop cartoons. It soon became evident that Betty was more popular than the bands and feature films, so the cartoon impresarios put together a whole day of Fleischer's work. From there they branched out and began showing the work of other animators, and in 1977 formed Mellow Manor productions, named for the Victorian house in Riverside where they began their work. These days, Spike & Mike's annual festival travels to more than 35 major cities in the U.S. and Canada. Fortunately for us, it also stops in Rhinebeck.

This year's offerings include 1997 Academy Award nominee Canhead, a claymation masterpiece by San Franciscan Tim Hittle. Other highlights: Stressed, a critique of city life composed of more than 5,500 sequenced oil paintings, by England's Karen Kelly; Canadian Brian McPhail's Stiffy, about a boy and his dead dog; and Chessmaster Theater, a Monty-Pythonesque spoof on chess game reportage, by John Wardlaw and Michael Wilcox of the U.S. The festival also features works from France, Norway and Australia.

Freed from the confines of Disney cuteness and Saturday morning commercialism, animation can be breathtakingly beautiful, cuttingly political, wackily funny, sick and twisted (Spike & Mike have a separate tour reserved for this category), sentimental or philosophical. If you still think of cartoons as something for the kids to watch while you sleep in, it'll be hard to convey the scope of these shorts, but here's a quote from the masters: "Spike & Mike promise not just another wallpaper that you can lick, but something closer to a razor-filled caramel apple for your mind, an everlasting gobstopper of animated mind travel, a zero-G color-rush in stereo. The limits are your own."

For more information, call Upstate Films at 876-2515, or visit Spike & Mike's website at www.spikeandmike.com. ++

Todd Paul