Animation Show of Shows Featuring ‘Piper,’ ‘Pearl’ Coming to Southern California Theaters

The latest edition of the Animation Show of Shows is opening in Southern California on Oct. 21 at the Sundance Sunset in West Los Angeles, Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 in Pasadena and the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana.

This is the second year that the annual collection of animated short films from around the world has played in theatrical release around the U.S., following a successful Kickstarter campaign last year in an effort to bring global shorts to a wider audience.

Ron Diamond of Acme Filmworks has curated the compilation for the last 16 years, and many past offerings have gone on to win awards, including last year’s entry “World of Tomorrow” by Don Hertzfeldt, which won the Annie Award for best short and was nominated for an Academy Award along with fellow Show of Shows alum “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos.”

Diamond and some of the directors of this year’s selection will be on hand at the Sundance Sunset screening on Oct. 21 and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7 screening on Oct. 22.

Among the 16 films featured in the 18th edition of the Animation Show of Shows are Alan Barillaro’s “Piper,” which screened this summer ahead of Pixar’s “Finding Dory,” and “Pearl,” a virtual reality offering from Google Spotlight Stories by Patrick Osborne, who directed the Academy Award-winning Disney short “Feast.”

The other films, which hail from such countries as the U.S., Belgium, Canada, South Korea and Russia, are “Stems” by Ainslie Henderson; “Shift” by Cecilia Puglesi & Yijun Liu; “Crin-Crin” by Iris Alexandre; “Mirror” by Chris Ware, John Kuramoto and Ira Glass; “Last Summer in the Garden” by Bekky O’Neil; “Waiting for the New Year” by Vladimir Leschiov; “Boygen” by Kristian Pedersen; “Afternoon Class” by Seoro Oh; “About a Mother” by Dina Velikovskaya; “Exploozy” by Joshua Gunn, Trevor Piecham and John McGowan; “Corpus” by Marc Hericher; “Blue” by Daniela Sherer; “Manoman” by Simon Cartwright; and “All Their Shades” by Chloe Alliez.

The showcase will be making the rounds of theaters and other venues through the end of the year.

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