Polonia Global Fund

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — In a digitally animated film entitled The Cathedral, a man stumbles across a dreary landscape into a dark, ominous building. A brilliant flash of light fills the cavernous space, and branches shoot up, extending the structure high in the sky and seemingly strangling the man in the process.

The entry from a tiny Polish production company in Siggraph’s computer animation festival is one of a number of serious, often troubling works picked by this year’s judges — reflecting both their concerns about world events and their desire to allow new, international voices to join the festival’s often Hollywood-heavy fare.

“Some of those themes in Cathedral were as good as anything in Lord of the Rings,” said festival chair and Hollywood veteran John McIntosh of New York’s School of Visual Arts.

Production companies like Poland’s Platige Image have received more attention from judges who are still reeling from the events of Sept. 11, plunging economies around the world and war in the Middle East.

“It’s a different world now,” McIntosh said. “We take ourselves and our lives more seriously.”

Students from a French computer graphics and art school called Supinfocom had three winning entries in the festival’s prestigious Electronic Theater — beating out Hollywood heavies LucasFilm, Digital Domain, PDI DreamWorks and Sony.

Each of the short films dealt with disturbing themes. The Deserter portrays a young man who tries to escape the horrors of World War I by attaching a device to a bird that gives him the illusion of soaring away from his surroundings.

Sarah is about a girl fleeing on a labyrinth of roller-coaster tracks from machines that want to control her.

And a piece with a deceptively flippant title, Recycle Bein’, features a man pursued by a monsters from a junk yard, such as a giant rat and a fiend with razor arms.

Europe didn’t have a monopoly on serious work. The Electronic Theater’s grimmest work Gjenta — two featureless balls filled with cadaverous humans rolling endlessly in a circle and pausing only to exchange passengers — came from Erik Bakke of San Francisco.

Despite the heaviness, the judges still picked a good dose of humorous pieces. The biggest crowd pleaser was a Japanese entry, Polygon Family: Episode 2, in which an errant husband gets a martial arts whipping from his wife. Hollywood-based Duck Soup’s The Snowman — about a snowman that gets mistakenly kidnapped by aliens intent upon grilling him for secrets about Earth’s planetary defense system — was a close second.

Hollywood was hardly left out in the cold. Disney showed off its Human Face Project, the closest anyone has come yet to creating a face indistinguishable from a video image.

Sony got to show off riveting Spider-Man clips; and Digital Domain had Lord of the Rings and Time Machine.

But, as McIntosh noted, the real wow factor was that individuals with practically no budgets produced pictures as compelling as Hollywood films with digital effects budgets in the tens of millions of dollars.

“We all get so bogged down in industry work, and we think that’s the high-water mark,” said Technicolor executive Bob Hoffman. “This was some of the best work in the world, irrespective of money.”