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A super unique animation screening series is happening this Sunday, April 20, in Los Angeles: The Animation Freakout Hangout, which is billed as L.A.’s first “all-vintage festival of far out, beautiful and bizarro animation.”
The event is taking place at The Philosophical Research Society (3910 Los Feliz Blvd) and includes programs curated by different local curatorial groups (EXP TV, Animation Breakdown, Whammy! Analog, and Cathode Cinema). The afternoon-to-evening event will include four screenings, a courtyard bar, and a vintage video lounge.
Check out the festival trailer here:
Animation Freakout Hangout is the brainchild of the Philosophical Research Society’s film programmer Alex McDonald, who used to run Cinefamily’s much-beloved indie animation fest Animation Breakdown.
Tickets are $10 per screening, or $28 for the entire event. Cartoon Brew readers can get 20% off individual event tickets by using the discount code FOR20 at checkout.
We caught up with McDonald to learn more about the idea for the festival and what will be shown:
Cartoon Brew: Talk a little bit about your concept for the festival. It’s classic and vintage animation but not commonly known titles. What was some of your selection criteria and what do you hope viewers get out of it?
Alex McDonald: The concept for The Animation Freakout Hangout was to create more of “a happening” than a straight ahead festival. It’s in the name itself: something laid back, communal, informal – a vibe! The choice of date for the event was baked (pun acknowledged) in from the beginning, and I wanted to create a sprawling cinema experience that harkened back to when independent animation, having exploded in the 1960s and ’70s, was a subculture in itself that was intrinsically linked to the era’s counterculture.
So many unbelievably inventive, experimental, and playful films came out of that time period, films that saw their creators pushing the boundaries of style and technique. Their works were then received by crowds at film festivals, underground cinemas, and college campuses who were eager to have their minds blown…and had often, uh, “prepared” themselves for their viewing experience. The aim was to recreate that experience, while paying homage to its roots, with selections of far out vintage films that were either clearly made with that hazy, altered set in mind, or were, as much art from the era, simply intrinsically trippy.
That’s certainly the case with the proto-cgi programs – these artists were exploring new frontiers with new technology and, by design, the works were meant to wow viewers by showing them a whole new realm of visual possibilities. Though it’s an entirely different aesthetic, the spirit of the works is the same and they fit organically side by side with the earthier films – particularly now as they are both incredible artifacts of a time when adventurous audiences showed up for animation that was eager to astound. That spirit of communal discovery is what we’re aiming for!
It was important to me that this event have a warm, in-person, community energy, so I invited friends from some fantastic L.A. based media collectives – including EXP TV, Whammy! Analog, and Cathode Cinema – to be a part of this psychedelic animation potluck and bring their own mixes of groovy vintage animation. They all understood the assignment magnificently and I can’t wait for folks to see what they’ve cooked up.
One of the programs is on 16mm and another is on VHS. What is the importance of choosing these different media formats to present the films in the program?
It’s all part of creating something that is uniquely experiential while honoring the energy of these films and their histories. 16mm was, in large part, the domain of animated shorts for generations, and it has the warm, organic quality that is immediately evocative of that time and the way in which these films were typically first seen. For many of these titles, it’s still the only way to see them, too. I dusted off my old Animation Breakdown moniker to curate that program in (Psychedelic Celluloid: Awesome Animated Oddities on 16mm!, 4:45pm) in collaboration with a print collector, Eric Cheevers, who has a truly amazing collection of weird and wonderful 16mm films, and many of these films have never been on video nor can they be seen on Youtube. Several of them barely have any information available online, so that’s going to be a really incredible, one-of-a-kind screening.
For the VHS program, early cgi has become sort of a hauntological touchstone of its time, and we wanted to lean into that. There was a rash of computer animation home videos in the 1990s and that’s how most of us who were old enough were first exposed to that exciting and novel visual realm. Obviously cgi is now omnipresent, and whether its aim is hyper-realistic vfx or stylized “toonfulness” (e.g. Spider-Verse, TMNT: Mutant Mayhem, Bad Guys) we’re now used to seeing it presented in as high resolution as possible. But this earlier animation is from a time when the medium’s limitations became an innate part of the aesthetic, creating an uncanny reality that embraced its wholly unique look. That look is all the more unique and endearing decades later, and the texture of VHS instantly evokes a warm, slightly ghostly nostalgia – even for young vaporwave aficionados not old enough to have first experienced this animation that way.
It underlines, to me, that this is art that is both of its time but still otherworldly. The big title that Whammy! Analog (an incredible brick-and-mortar VHS shop and micro-cinema in Echo Park) is presenting on VHS is what I consider to now be the “Vaporwave Fantasia”: Odyssey Films’ Beyond the Mind’s Eye (1992). Its producer, Steven Churchill, let us know he had a stunning 2k high-def version of the film available and I can imagine hearing we wanted to screen the film from VHS is like if there was a gorgeous stereo digital remaster of an artist’s album, but the fans are clinging to a dusty old mono vinyl copy instead. We’re grateful to him for understanding our concept and that this will be a singular way of experiencing the film on the big screen.
Anotehr is a 1970s feature that I’d never heard of, The Cathedral of New Emotions. Can you tell us how this film was discovered and what makes it so special?
Our grand finale, part of Cathode Cinema’s Animation Vortex program, is Helmut Herbst’s The Cathedral of New Emotions, one of the most wholly psychedelic animated features ever made, in company with the likes of Fantastic Planet and Belladonna of Sadness. But one of the most mindblowing things about this wild, seemingly ’70s gem is…that it’s from 2006! I first discovered it, broken into lo-res chunks, on Youtube over a decade ago with an incredibly low view count and next to no information available. What info there was did date the film’s release as 2006, but I presumed that was when it premiered or was finished – it was so obviously a product of the wild 1970s. Its mystery haunted me for years and I’d been determined to learn more and to someday bring it to the world.
In 2023, Dennis Bartok of Deaf Crocodile Films asked me if I had any titles to suggest for them to restore and distribute and I immediately pitched Cathedral. They set out to track down Helmut Herbst and solve the mystery of this incredible oddity. We quickly learned that Herbst had passed away in 2021, but his widow (who sadly passed a few months ago) assisted with the project. I was amazed to learn what an integral figure he was in German experimental animation.
Herbst got his start in the late 1950s as an experimental animator and filmmaker, and ended up founding Germany’s first post-war animation studio – Cinegrafik, who did animation for German Sesame Street, children’s tv films, and special effects for features. He co-created an experimental, effects-heavy, live-action feature in 1974 called The Fantastic World of Matthew Madson about an astronaut who is marooned on a strange planet, but went on to spend a great chunk of his life as an esteemed film professor. It wasn’t until he retired in 2000, in his late ’60s, that he picked up where he left off in the 1970s…continuing the story of Matthew Madson with an animated feature, with the aim to work as independently as possible.
He integrated old techniques such as rotoscoping (of footage he took in the 1970s) with digital illustration and all of the dialogue was created by a type-to-speech program called Logox Speechbox. The fact that all of the characters speak in computerized voices only adds to the total bonkersness of the film but also fits with its narrative of dehumanization and isolation – as the premise follows a commune from 1972 Berlin who have been adrift in space for ages, searching for their founder (Matthew Madson!) who has been marooned on a strange planet.
The film premiered at a festival in Germany in 2006 and never screened again. Herbst had also created a web graphic novel version of the film at the same time which was discovered, around 2010 I believe, by animator Nick Criscuolo. Nick reached out to Helmut and they became penpals. Helmut sent Nick the film to upload to Youtube, which is where I found it. But now it’s been beautifully restored from the original 35mm film print and released by Deaf Crocodile. I was honored to play a part in bringing this utterly bizarre and incredible film to a broader audience – it deserves to take its rightful place in the hallowed halls of truly farout animated films. We held a soft premiere for it here at The Philosophical Research Society in late 2024, but I’m hoping the festival helps it reach a new, broader audience. It is a total trip on the big screen – there’s really no other animated feature quite like it!
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