I learned about a film by director Don Hertzfeldt, “It’s Such a Beautiful Day.” Online descriptions of it are very glowing. It’s available on the Criterion Channel but I haven’t watched it yet.

I checked my library and their consortium doesn’t have that movie available, so I searched for Don Hertzfeldt and found the disks “The Animation Show” volume 1 and 2 coming from a touring show of animations from 2003-2008.

One of the animations is directed by Corky Quakenbush about the character Ricardo. Ricardo is about 4 and describes a few humorous events. He finds a pornographic coffee table book about Madonna (Madama) and ties up the cat like he saw in the book. Of course, his mom was not amused; she washed his mouth out with soap when he described the book. He describes a few more episodes in the brief animation. A YouTube copy of video The Adventures of Ricardo. As a four year old, he doesn’t understand everything but he’s really enthusiastic. The animation isn’t very sophisticated but it makes up for that with charm.

There’s also a trilogy of shorts by Adam Elliot on The Animation Show: “Brother,” “Uncle” and “Cousin.” They’re available on the Adam Elliot website. These have a droll description of a child’s relatives. Each of the trilogy features a pet graveyard and the observations that a child might make. Very matter-of-fact and to the point.

Another entertaining short from the collection is Rockfish directed by Tim Miller about a fishing trip of subterranean “fish” that take the protagonist on a ride, pulling him across the desert like a shark or whale might in the ocean.

One of the directors in the video is PES. He has a short film Fireworks that is an animation of a candy fireworks show. PES has an additional animation, Kaboom! that is presented as an extra feature on Animation Show 2. The Kaboom! short is about a war climaxing with an nuclear attack on a city. The city and all of the items in the video are created from different antique household objects. YouTube has other videos by PES that I had watched years ago but didn’t know the connection. PES has an account on YouTube and his website is pesfilm.com

There are additional disks, Animation Show 3 (2007) and Animation Show 4 (2008).