The animated anthology Cartoons: No Laughing Matter? is aptly named. Its eight British and American shorts offer a few chuckles, though mostly of the ironic or bitterly bleak variety. But the majority are unrelentingly grim. "Cartoons aren't just for kids anymore" has been a cliché for decades now, but it's rarely seemed this appropriate.
Granted, "adult animation" doesn't necessarily mean "animation for all adults' tastes." The program's two most ambitious pieces, Lisa Crafts' "The Flooded Playground" and Suzan Pitt's "El Doctor," both run to patience-trying lengths with their wandering stories. "Playground" features an abstract story about a child—digitally animated to look like a stop-motion baby-doll—tormented by household horrors and eventually ejected into a living, sometimes hostile forest. The imagery is hit-or-miss, but it's often chilling, until the lack of momentum leeches away the menace. "El Doctor" features the anthology's most vivid animation, but its surreal, nightmarish medical adventures become trying, and take too long to reveal their intent.
Shorter, tighter, and more poignant shorts include Suzie Templeton's miserablist "Dog," in which a boy's pet becomes a metaphor for something else; Andy and Carolyn London's "The Back Brace," a darkly comic story about the misery and mockery that accompany a teenager's corrective brace; and Chris Shepherd & David Shrigley's "Who I Am And What I Want," in which gruesomely violent, bare-bones line drawings belie the calm narration of a psychotic describing his fractious life.
Of the eight pieces, Debra Solomon's "Everybody's Pregnant" seems most out of place; a cheery, colorful musical short that recalls Callahan's print cartoons with its shaky-lined flat two-dimensionality, it turns Solomon's fertility problems into a series of sight gags. George Griffin's "It Pains Me to Say This" is similarly bright and simply illustrated, though it has a broader agenda—it begins with a short story about a couple clashing over a four-letter word, then deconstructs that story from several analytical perspectives. But the collection's real prize is JJ Villard's riveting "Son Of Satan." Adapting a Charles Bukowski story, it puts raw, strikingly ugly images to Bukowski's equally ugly story about a boy who incites an assault on a neighborhood kid. Much of Cartoons: No Laughing Matter? is punishingly unpleasant, in spite of the quality of the experimental visions and the lack of Spike & Mike-style gross-out gags. "Son Of Satan" at least gives unpleasantness a purpose, by mapping it to lives that seem recognizably real.