Blame Walt Disney.
It's not necessarily just his fault — he certainly wasn't the only creative force churning out kids' cartoons in the early part of the 20th century — but as his media empire grew ever more vast over the course of his lifetime, cartoons became firmly entrenched in the pop-culture psyche as a vehicle suitable only for certain kinds of storytelling.
Animation today is still locked into that rut — an animated film is usually for kids, sometimes for families, which just means that grown-ups don't want to stab out their own eyes while they watch it. It's probably going to feature a tightly-plotted story with some sort of moral compass, a heavy dose of humor, and perhaps some songs. More often than not, talking animals are involved.
If you want to experience animation removed from that narrow mainstream definition — work that doesn't necessarily aim at kids, or serve up jokes, or even tell much of a story — you have to turn to projects like The Animation Show. Launched in 2003 by Mike Judge (Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill, Office Space) and Don Hertzfeldt (Rejected, Everything Will Be OK), The Animation Show is a semi-annual animation film festival, featuring short films collected together for both screenings nationwide and DVD release. It's probably the preeminent national outlet for the work of student, indie, and avant-garde animators. The most recent DVD release, The Animation Show Volume 3, is a challenging collection of edgy animated shorts that represents where the art form is today, and where it could be going tomorrow.
Being able to pick up a DVD collection of these shorts is by itself some kind of minor miracle; to be able to relax in the comfort of your own home and experience the leading edge in creativity through animation is kind of amazing. This is the stuff that even ten years ago you'd be lucky to see once a year at your nearest art house theater--and that's only if you lived in a major metropolitan area that could support such a venue. Today, you're just an Amazon order away from this material.
So it's easier than ever to get quality indie animation into the hands of its fans...and yet, it's important to note that The Animation Show isn't for everybody. The mix of material on Volume 3 represents a wide swath of styles, technologies, and tones. There's light comedy in "Astronauts," about two spacefaring guys experiencing trouble sharing the same rocketship. There's Looney Tunes-style slapstick in "Versus," where two warring factions of samurai attempt to destroy each other's fortresses across a wide gulf, with madcap results.
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