by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

In the medium of animation, it's remarkable what can be communicated with a simple, thin black line or two. One animator who has, for more than two decades, been capitalizing on the paradoxical possibilities of less-is-more is Germany's Raimund Krumme.

Take 1991's Die Kreuzung ("the crossing") or Seiltänzer ("rope dancer") from '86. Raw, hand-drawn pencil lines bisect a blank white field, shifting slightly to suggest movement and distance. Once crude human figures - silhouettes, really - are introduced, the potential for optical illusion grows exponentially. As the characters leap, crawl and amble their way above, below, around and behind the lines, a wall becomes a bridge becomes a sidewalk becomes a hole in the ground.

Largely devoid of text or chatter, most of Krumme's shorts stick to the minimalist pencil-on-paper approach, though he has made one neat computerized short and his latest, Gefangenenchor ("prison choir"), transposes his sensibility into a live-action, dance-based approach.

Georges Schwizgebel's L'Homme sans ombre and Nicolas Brault's Islet each seem to expand on Krumme's non-verbal devices, the former in the use of op-art trickery and tangled angles, the latter in spotlighting the strength of line-based cartoon.

Both are in the NFB's new animation anthology Mindtravel, a tag that suggests a psychedelic brainfuck of the gentler variety. A few of the shorts do approach the realm of the genuinely hallucinatory. Jacques Drouin's Imprints is a whirling, swirling picture-poem, the work of a master manipulator of that rare and remarkable device, the pinscreen. Lejf Marcussen's digital dreamscape Angeli compiles the visions of a trio of hospital patients, and any effort to describe or explain this elegant, phantasmagoric frenzy would fall short.

The strongest work in Mindtravel, though, is Craig Welch's Welcome to Kentucky. Exquisitely shaded pencil drawings are the basis for this slow, patient drift through a surrealist landscape that is at once impossible and alarmingly familiar.

Hommage à Raimund Krumme screens at la Cinémathèque québécoise Thursday, Nov. 25 at 6:30 p.m. and Mindtravel screens at Ex-Centris from Friday, Nov. 26 to Thursday, Dec. 2 at 3:05 p.m. and 7 p.m.

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