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Baby Got Back | Chris Landreth’s The Spine is one of the highlights of the NFB’s new Get Animated! collection.

NFB GET ANIMATED!
Various directors. Metro Cinema (Zeidler Hall, The Citadel). Mon, Oct 26 (“Family Program” at 7pm, “Animation Feast” at 8pm). Free.
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As part of the National Film Board’s week-long celebration of World Animation Day (a week to celebrate a day — can someone explain that math to me?), this Monday evening Metro Cinema joins theatres all over Canada in screening over a dozen cutting-edge animated shorts from across the country. Their styles, genres, and settings may vary wildly, but there’s an undeniably Canadian current running through it all — you’ll probably see something you recognize, and you’ll definitely see something you love. Fresh, funny, and bursting wiht life, this is a terrific — and terrifically eclectic — collection.

Plus it’s all free. So c’mon, what else are you going to do on a Monday night?

First, at 7 p.m., is the family program, but don’t be fooled: there’s something here for animation fans of all ages. From Philip Eddolls’s delightfully wordless Git Gob, where two gingerbread-like creatures argue over what a hole is, to Pierre-Luc Granjon and Pascal le Notre’s epic fairy tale Léon in Wintertime, these shorts demonstrate the power and delight of mythmaking, and also remind us how fertile the ground is in this often-overlooked medium.

And it’s impossible to miss the sheer dedication it must take to spend so many months and years labouring over a product that lasts all of five minutes and will be seen, quite frankly, by almost nobody. It’s both an act of heroism and a minor tragedy. Everything you see at Get Animated! comes straight from the heart, no doubt about it.

Then, at 8 p.m., is the “Animation Feast” portion of the evening, where the pieces get a little more ambiguous, and a little more experimental. From Chris Landreth (who won an Oscar for his 2004 short Ryan) we get a remarkable new piece called The Spine, which takes place at a group therapy session for couples with co-dependency issues. The participants’ psyches are projected onto their physical bodies, from two beaten-up husbands whose flesh is tearing away in strips to the group mediator, whose position of power is represented by his entire body taking the eerie shape of a hand. The Spine hits from all angles, and it hits hard. Landreth, by the way, will also be appearing at The ARTery (9535 Jasper Ave) this Saturday at 3 p.m. to talk about the making of the film.

There’s something to savour in nearly all of these shorts, whether it’s a neat shot of butter melting in a frying pan (in Daniel Janke’s How People Got Fire) or the bustle of a market overwhelming a timid housewife (in Inès Sedan’s maroon-sketched The Man Who Slept).

But if there’s one short you should make time for, it’s Runaway, a manic 10-minute film from Oscar-nominated animator Cordell Barker and scored by The Triplets of Belleville composer Ben Charest. The premise is pure vintage comedy: a coal-powered train, carrying a front car of snobs and a back car of slobs, hits a stray cow on the tracks and goes wild, forcing the bumbling apprentice conductor to try and keep things under control. It’s told with impeccable attention to detail, tons of humour, and some rather biting class satire underneath it all.

The decision to include it in both portions of the evening is smart: Runaway is so good you’ll want to see it twice.