Highly Animated and Uncensored Offerings : There’s little that’s cartoonish about program at Chapman University.

Today’s most accomplished young animators are heirs to a rich legacy of weirdness traceable to the likes of R. Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, who helped shift popular culture away from the mainstream bromides of mid-century America, and before them to Max Fleischer, the creator of Betty Boop and Coco the Clown in their pre-censored days.

But 26-year-old Mike Booth, a British animator whose 1996 short feature “The Saint Inspector” will be screened Saturday on a program called “General Chaos: Uncensored Animation” at Chapman University, is, if anything, even quirkier and more sophisticated than his predecessors in the cartoon underground.

Although Booth shares their anarchic spirit of rebellion, this enigmatic work bears a certain literary weight, not unlike a wordless Beckett play. In five minutes of stop-action clay animation both brooding and scintillating, “The Saint Inspector” shows a higher being in a state of pious bliss enduring the attentions of a meddling official from some sort of high-altitude bureaucracy.

“The technique involves painstaking labor,” says Jan Cox, director of the animated shorts division of Manga Entertainment, which plans to distribute the “Uncensored Animation” program for nationwide theatrical release beginning in early 1998. “It’s no less an art form than oil painting or sculpture.”

Along with “The Saint Inspector,” which has won many festival awards and has been offered for Academy Award consideration in March, Cox will present a handful of animated shorts as part of a program for the newly formed Orange County chapter of Women in Animation. The screening, open to the public, is free. Saturday, 6:30 p.m., Argyros Forum, Room 208, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. (714) 744-7018.

Also being shown is German animator Tyron Montgomery’s “Quest,” a stop-action, puppet-animation film (7 minutes), which won the 1996 Academy Award for animated short. It follows the adventures of a nameless, faceless figure made of earth who goes in search of water, which drips incessantly just beyond its reach. More fascinating than the figure itself are the surreal wormholes it keeps falling through in a nonlinear descent from the pale, shifting surfaces of an exterior world to the dark, threatening interior of a mechanized universe.

Though the program is dominated by men, British animator Frances Lea goes a long way toward righting the balance with her strong 1995 puppet-animation feature “Oh Julie!” (9 minutes), perhaps the most raucous and subversive work on the program.

Lea offers a comical, if nightmarish, glimpse of romance, in which a couple “score” for sex. Each partner, eager to impress and seduce, puts on alluring attractions--she perfect breasts and lips, he tufts of hair and a huge phallus--until they turn into copulating body parts.

Meanwhile, hand-drawn, cel-animated vignettes from American artist Bill Plympton’s “Sex and Violence” (7 minutes) appear throughout the program like a running vaudeville gag--quick, funny and offbeat--with an eccentric cast of characters. The program also offers Stefan Eling’s “Killing Heinz” (3 minutes), a deadpan satire with an unmistakable German atmosphere.

Still another style of animation--Japanese anime, which depends on computer-generated imagery--will be explored in a 30-minute video about the making of “Ghost in a Shell,” a full-length anime feature film that reached No. 1 on the Billboard Top Video Sales chart last summer. Heavily influenced in its storytelling by computer technology as well, “Ghost,” which also has a worldwide cult following, creates a sort of cyberspace where “Blade Runner” meets “RoboCop” meets “The Terminator.”

Also screening in Orange County:

* The UCI Film Society presents “Memories of Underdevelopment” at 7 and 9 p.m. Friday at the UCI Student Center Crystal Cove Auditorium, near Campus Drive and Pereira Road. $2.50-$4.50. (714) 824-5588.

* “Eat Drink Man Woman” screens at 7 p.m. Saturday at the Costa Mesa Church of Religious Science, 2850 Mesa Verde East, Suite M. $3.50. (714) 373-0432.

* Warren Miller Entertainment presents “Snowriders 2: The Journey Continues,” an extreme-ski film, at 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $15. (714) 556-2787.

* The documentary “Pablo Picasso” screens at noon Tuesday in the Lyon Auditorium at the Museum Education Center of the Orange County Museum of Art, 855 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Free. (714) 759-1122.

* Five wartime shorts, including “Musical Poster No. 1” (1940), “Women in Defense” (1942), “Daffy the Commando” (1939), “Autobiography of a Jeep” (1943) and “The Battle of Midway” (1942) will screen Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Room 208 of Chapman University’s Argyros Forum, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. Free. (714) 744-7018.

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In L.A. and beyond:

The Music Hall’s “Jewish Cinema Series” begins Friday in Beverly Hills with a one-week run of Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky’s “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” a look at Jews whose lives are lived in worship of God and are guided by the dictates of the Torah. (310) 274-6869.

The American Cinematheque screens Seattle filmmaker Gregg Lachow’s “The Wright Brothers” tonight at 7:30 at Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. (213) 466-FILM.

Filmforum presents Nicolas Philibert’s “Every Little Thing,” an account of patients at a psychiatric clinic who are staging a pageant. It screens at noon Saturday and Sunday at the Nuart in West L.A. (310) 478-6379.

“PXL This Seven,” this year’s annual festival of videos made with the PXL-2000 toy camera, premieres Saturday with programs at 7 and 9 p.m., at the Midnight Special Bookstore, 1318 Third Street Promenade, Santa Monica. (310) 393-2923.

Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon’s documentary “Heart of a Child” screens Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex in Santa Monica. (310) 394-9741.

On Friday at 8 p.m., the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 8949 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, will screen “Hollywood Rhythm,” 15 musical shorts produced by Paramount between 1929 and 1941. (310) 247-3600.