The Animation Show
(Mon., Nov. 7, 7 p.m., County Theater, Doylestown; Wed., Nov. 9, 7 p.m., Bryn Mawr Film Institute; Thu., Nov. 10, 7 p.m., Ambler Theater)

Animation may sit at the kids' table most of the year, but Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt's sporadic showcase gives ink and paint a chance to shine. The 85-minute anthology spans countries and techniques -- enough to point up the absurdity of lumping all animated films into the same cartoony ghetto. Just try finding common ground between Georges Schwizgebel's elegant, painterly fable The Man With No Shadow and the slam-bang grotesquerie of Ward 13, a stop-motion escape short more engaging than most big-budget action movies. Generally speaking, The Animation Show's hand-tooled segments are the most captivating, skimming the boundary between still drawings and moving pictures. The elegant shading of When the Day Breaks lends a melancholy air to its story of lonely, disconnected urban dwellers, which loses not an ounce of poignancy for the fact that its main characters are a chicken in a bowler hat and a warbling, apron-clad pig. David Russo's Pan With Us is the most jaw-dropping exercise, somehow inserting loose, sketchy wiggles into unbroken live-action tracking shots, although Hertzfeldt earns plenty of awe with the in-camera spacescapes of The Meaning of Life, a major departure for the king of stick-figure cynicism. As with the first installment, Schwizgebel is the undiscovered treasure here: The Man With No Shadow is a flawlessly textured parable about a man who sells the devil something more precious than his soul, its constantly moving camera and vertiginous POV shifts creating a simultaneous sense of awe and unease.

Misc. Picks: The Jewish Film Festival devotes its opening weekend to the memory of founder Archie Perlmutter. The ever-feisty Peter Falk will accept a Lifetime Achievement Award before the screening of the euthanasia comedy Checking Out (Sat., 8 p.m.), while Sunday's screenings include the Argentine Only Human (2 p.m.) and Germany's Go for Zucker! (7 p.m.). The weekend closes with Protocols of Zion (Mon., 7 p.m.), reviewed on p. 76. All screenings at the Gershman Y, Broad and Pine sts., 215-446-3033.