Pipe Cleaner Chronicles

"Come into a world of pipecleaners and hot glue; where people have no faces yet express themselves perfectly, and they have no idea of the larger world beyond their shallow, cardboard existence." Except for the fact that it's a slightly run-on sentence, this weird bit of jacket copy sums up, quite nicely, the essence of Doug Aberle's stop-motion animation short films. In "Wire We Here," "Wired for the Holidays," "Haywire Heart," and "The Dirt on Mom," we meet the pipe cleaner family--Mom, Dad, Junior, Sis, Baby--who in endearing Trumanesque fashion (and this was before The Truman Show) are constantly stumbling up against the artificiality of their film set world. In addition to the four shorts collected here (made between 1994-1998), budding animators are treated to a behind-the-scenes "making of" documentary in which Aberle demonstrates the techniques he uses to bring his pipe cleaner characters to life. The inclusion of the "how-to" makes this a good choice for both public libraries and school collections with introductory film classes. Recommended. (R. Pitman)