Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation, Mellow Manor Productions' annual showcase of quirky animated shorts from all over the globe, has returned to UC Santa Cruz's Kresge Town Hall with a batch of all-new cutting-edge films for animation fans raised on more than just Hanna-Barbera and Disney. This Original Festival includes the Oscar-nominated "Canhead," by Tim Hittle of Bay Area's Pixar Studios (Toy Story); Briton Karen Kelly's "Stressed," a movie about inner-city London created from a sequence of more than 5500 oil paintings; and San Franciscan Mike Johnson's bouncy "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."
Past Spike & Mike festivals (including the racier Sick and Twisted Festivals) have introduced to filmgoers now-famous animators like Mike Judge (Beavis and Butt-head), England's Nick Park (the Wallace and Gromit shorts), John Lasseter (Toy Story) and Trey Parker and Matt Stone (South Park). Mellow Manor CEO and co-founder Craig "Spike" Decker started the Original Festival with his partner, the late Mike Gribble, in Riverside in 1977. According to Spike, the current festival has a bunch of upstart filmmakers who have the potential of becoming as successful as the likes of Judge, Park and Lasseter. "I think Steven Fonti, who did a film for Sick and Twisted called 'Yes, Timmy, There is a Santa Claus,' is really talented. People like 'Political Correction' [Fonti's Schoolhouse Rock spoof in the Original Festival] a lot," Spike said. "They identify with it. He's a clever, funny guy."
Spike also thinks highly of Johnson, whose "Devil Went Down to Georgia" was an audience favorite at this year's Sick and Twisted Festival, which played at Kresge in November. "Devil," a stop-motion short about a battle between Satan and a country boy for a golden fiddle, is energized by Primus' Les Claypool's outstanding rendition of the Charlie Daniels Band standard. "Johnson worked on Skellington Productions in San Francisco [which created the nuanced stop-motion animation for The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach]," Spike said. "People love the film; it's very energetic. It gets the crowd up and going."
With the current TV animation boom sweeping networks that want to develop the next Simpsons or the next King of the Hill and Nickelodeon and the Family Channel scrambling to compete with Ted Turner's ever-growing Cartoon Network, you would think there would be a Spike and Mike Channel, right? I suggested to Spike that maybe he should start a channel that would air Fritz the Cat twice a day and reruns of Ralph Bakshi's censored, long-unseen '80s Mighty Mouse series — one of my favorite cartoons of all time. "Yeah, that'd be a blast. I'd like to do a Spike & Mike show or Spike & Mike hour on some channel. That'd be fun," Spike said.
According to Spike, the past year has been very successful for Mellow Manor. "Eventually, you just last long enough they have to recognize you," he said. "It's like John Huston's quote in Chinatown: 'Ugly buildings, hookers and politicians get respectable if they last long enough.' There's certainly some truth in that."
Spike & Mike's Festival of Animation will play at Kresge Town Hall from May 1-2 at 8:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m. and from May 3-4 at 8:00 p.m. Tickets are $7. For more info, call Kresge Town Hall at 459-3925.