Odyssey: The Mind's Eye Presents - Computer Animation Classics
The short films in this anthology were made during the '80s,  when  commercials, network logos, and station IDs made the general public  aware of  the new medium of computer graphics (CG). Many of the films are  portfolio  pieces, demos, student works, and experiments in technique, without  real  story lines or characters. The look and even the subjects were largely  determined by what was easy to do on a computer: candy-apple colors,  merry-go-rounds, foil-leafed palm trees, mirrors, and twisting point- of-view shots.A few of the films hold up well, notably the video to Mick Jagger's  "Hard  Woman," and it's interesting to contrast the weightless, metallic  dinosaurs in "Chromosaurus" with the more realistic versions inJurassic  Park. Others  have aged less gracefully: "Tony De Peltrie" looks even uglier today  than it  did in 1985.Classicssurveys only one strain of CG history; among the  important  omissions are Peter Foldes' groundbreaking "Hunger" (1973), the experimental  works of John Whitney Sr., Ed Emshwiller, Lillian Schwartz, and Larry  Cuba, the scientific films of Jim Blinn, and John Lasseter's brilliant Pixar shorts.  The resulting disk is more effective as eye candy or a historical  overview of one specialized area of CG than as a general entertainment.--Charles Solomon