Festival Dispatch: Platform in Portland

The first [Platform International Animation Festival ]kicked off in Portland, Oregon on Monday night with free drinks, industry schmoozing and a head-to-head battle between character-driven comedy and abstract artistic expression. The latter, hosted by New York indie powerhouse, [Bill Plympton ](http://www.plymptoons.com/)and Portland's own, [Joanna Priestley](http://users.easystreet.com/joanna/), respectively, was an appropriate start to a weeklong schedule of short film festival competition, which never fails to run the gamut from good to bad to downright indecipherable -- regardless of your personal tastes.

I wasn't the only one who was surprised that none of the New York finest had been accepted into competition at Platform, especially after I saw that ad agency-arranged commercials for United Airlines, FedEx and Ben and Jerry's had made the cut. Proving that no amount of unexplainable exclusion can keep New Yorkers down, independent artists like Plympton, [PES] and [Patrick Smith](http://www.squarefootagefilms.com/smith/) are making their award-winning, crowd-drawing presence known through panel discussions and special screenings like Smith's "Animation from Hell," PES' "Hey, Check Out My PES Collection" and [Nina Paley](http://blog.ninapaley.com/)'s work-in-progress sneak peek of her indie feature length project, "Sita Sings the Blues." Just who do these Oregonians think they are anyway?

Finally, does not giving a rat's ass about looking at animation on a cell phone make me some sort of neo-Luddite? The fest seems to be pushing the concept of cartoons on "mobile devices" pretty fucking hard. And call me a cynic, but I can't help but think there's a teensy-weensy bit of a coincidence in the fact that the company that's actively developing this new "innovation" in animation, [Cartoon Network], is also the festival's sole sponsor.

Image from Nina Paley's "[Sita Sings the Blues]"