MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Tournee of Animation’ a Treat for Stop-Motion Fans : Festival features 14 short films from Europe and the United States. It opens today at the Nuart in West L.A.

“The 24th International Tournee of Animation,” an uneven program of 14 short films from Europe and the United States opening today at the Nuart in West Los Angeles, confirms that stop-motion animation, a technique once relegated to Speedy Alka-Seltzer commercials and low-budget movie monsters, is enjoying a comeback.

“Prehistoric Beast” (U.S.), by Oscar-winning special-effects artist Phil Tippett, which depicts two dinosaurs stalking each other in a Mesozoic forest, eclipses the other films. This superbly animated short was a test for “Jurassic Park,” and it looks like a sequence from a big-budget feature.

Paul Berry’s previously reviewed “The Sandman” (U.K.) is also technically polished, if grisly.

Twenty-one minutes of the 90-minute program are devoted to “A Salute to the Dimensional Artistry of Will Vinton Studios” (U.S.), a collage of shorts and commercials that showcases the studio’s recent forays into conventional stop-motion and computer animation, instead of their popular clay films. (Vinton coined the term claymation.)

It’s an odd time to be saluting Vinton, as his studio recently lost the leadership of clay animation to London’s Aardman Animations (“Creature Comforts”). The characters made from old trophies and scraps of electrical junk in Vinton’s “Mr. Resistor” ape the nightmarish work of the brothers Quay, but lacks their eerie surrealism.

The “Tournee” is weakest in the field of drawn animation. “The Billy Nayer Show” by Cory McAbee and Bobby Lurie and “Le Carre de Lumiere” (“The Square of Light,” Switzerland) by Claude Luyet rely too heavily on traced live-action footage.

Viewers will quickly weary of the crude drawings and rudimentary movements in “We Love It” (U.S.) by Vincent Cafarelli and Candy Kugel and “The Man Who Yelled” (U.S.) by Mo Willems.

Many of the films in “The 24th International Tournee of Animation” simply don’t represent the best work being done in world animation. But stop-motion fans will enjoy some of them.

It runs through Feb. 3.

Times guidelines: some graphic and intense sequences.