The Cartoon as a Personal Statement : Movies: The L.A. Animation Celebration underscores the return of individual talent.

During the last decade, the success of animated features from the major studios, and including Disney’s current hit, “Beauty and the Beast,” has drawn attention away from the already neglected realm of the personal animated film.

Even during the “Golden Age” of the Hollywood studios, when the animators at Disney, MGM and Warner Bros. were creating their classic films, some artists felt an animated film should be a vehicle for personal expression, rather than a group project. These visionaries helped to keep the medium alive during the bad old days of the ‘70s, when animation threatened to become a synonym for mindless kidvid in the United States.

The recent Fourth Los Angeles Animation Celebration at the Nuart, offered local audiences a look at the current crop of personal films. After a shaky beginning in 1985, the Los Angeles Celebration has matured to become one of the world’s major festivals--and the only festival devoted to animation in the United States.

According to festival chairman Terry Thoren, 879 films were accepted in competition this year. He estimates that about 2,000 animated films are created each year worldwide. (The number sounds staggering, but many of these film are commercials and logos, some as brief as 10 seconds.)

Many of the films were strikingly original. In “Pictures From Memory” (Yugoslavia), Nedeljko Dragic fused personal memories and national history in a dense, almost Proustian evocation of the last half-century. Retal Berard and Andre Leduc turned the skies of the North American prairie into a vast historical mural in “Great Plain Days” (Canada): Delicately shaded colored pencil images of buffalo, pioneer women and Amerindians moved in a stately cosmic dance that reflects a boy’s growing awareness of his frontier heritage.

Caroline Leaf used the paint-on-glass technique she invented for “The Street” (1976) to explore the warped bonds that tie a physically handicapped writer to her emotionally crippled sibling in “Two Sisters” (Canada). Dark, intensely moving and almost claustrophobic in its intimacy, “Two Sisters” won the Grand Prize at the Celebration, and may well earn Leaf a second Oscar nomination.

For most Americans, animation remains linked to broad, cartoon humor, and there was certainly no shortage of laughs. For sheer, unabashed nuttiness, few films could rival Richard Conde’s “The Apprentice” (Canada), the tale of an inept, aspiring jester who can’t walk past a tree without bumping into it. Nick Park’s Academy Award-winning “Creature Comforts” (UK) and “The Potato Hunter” (USA), Timothy Hittle’s vegetable spoof of “Dances With Wolves,” had screened before in Los Angeles, but remained funny the second time around.

Many of the better films came from the justly celebrated National Film Board of Canada (NFB), which had been the center of creativity in world animation during the last two decades, but had suffered cutbacks in government funding during the later ‘80s.

In addition to “Great Plains Days,” “The Apprentice” and “Two Sisters,” notable NFB works included Wendy Tilby’s “Strings,” a sensitive portrait of two lonely old people, and “To Be,” John Weldon’s off-the-wall look at the relative nature of human existence.

But as the Celebration also made clear, the focus of the art of animation has shifted from Canada to London. There, the artists consistently produce the most innovative and imaginative new films. In “Creature Comforts” and the dazzling “Next!,” in which a figure of Shakespeare acts out the plots to 29 of his plays, the artists at Aardman Animations studio set a new standard for vivid characterizations in stop-motion animation.

These two works, and many of the other imaginative British films in the Celebration were partially financed by Britain’s Channel 4, which is dedicated to unconventional programming and has been underwriting original works.

Not all the films at the Celebration were wonderful, however.

The critical success of the nightmarish visions of Czech animator Jan Svankmajer (“Dimensions of Dialogue”) and the American-born, London-based twins, Stephen and Timothy Quay (“Street of Crocodiles”) has inspired a corps of surrealist wanna-bes whose work redefines tedium.

Other artists tried unsuccessfully to animate figures conceived in either New Wave or retro-’50s graphic styles. These characters only look good from one angle, and if an animator tries to move or turn them, they seem to fall apart.

Although the Celebration featured a number of excellent animated films, there were relatively few examples of fine animation. Many of the artists used imaginative cutting and editing as a substitute for accurately rendered motion. “Great Plains Days” is an exceptionally handsome film, but most of the movements were produced by dissolving from one piece of artwork to another. A grave problem for the future of animation is the demise of government-sponsored Eastern European studios, which produced some of the most interesting and challenging personal films of the past four decades. The socialist regimes underwrote the filmmaking costs to gain cultural prestige. But the new governments have balked at paying for film production during times of political upheaval and economic hardship. Yugoslavia’s Zagreb Film, which became the first foreign studio to win an Academy Award for Animated Short in 1961, has already closed. And studios in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and the former Soviet Union are either disbanding or being reorganized to bid for runaway television and feature work from the United States and elsewhere.

However, the biggest problems facing independent animators around the world are still money and exposure. Of the 2,000 or so films produced every year, perhaps 100 will screen in this country in programs of traveling shorts. And except for an occasional showing, most will never again see the light of day.

It takes months or even years for an individual artist to make an animated film, and few--if any--independent animators can support themselves through their work, despite supplemental grants from various arts endowments. Most animators finance their films by teaching, working in studios, doing odd jobs or making commercials. Even John and Faith Hubley, who won three Oscars and dozens of other awards for their innovative work (“Moonbird,” “Of Stars and Men”), had to make commercials and industrial films. The late John Hubley dubbed their personal films “Honors without profit.”

But most independent animators see their work as a calling, rather than a money-making proposition. The tradition of independent animation in America dates back to the pioneer artist, Winsor McCay. McCay dazzled audiences in 1911 with his first film, “Little Nemo,” based on his popular comic strip. McCay did all the drawings for the film himself--he didn’t trust an assistant to do them correctly.