Spastic movement, concentric circles, stripes and holes fill We Were Once Like That, a film by Rhode Island School of Design senior Andy Cahill.

Courtesy of RISD

Any longtime follower of the annual film-animation-video show at the Rhode Island School of Design will have noticed a gradual increase in the quality and depth of the works presented by the graduating seniors over the years. This year’s show, running May 14 to 17, is the best yet.

At a preview of some of this year’s output, I was bowled over by the quality, professionalism and imagination on screen. Best of all, there wasn’t one work that was a self-centered cry for attention. Some students traveled far — Costa Rica, Uganda — while another turned Providence into 19th-century London and the animation folk worked either on drawing boards or sometimes just inside their computers.

I’m not certain whether Andy Cahill’s stop-motion animated short We Were Once Nothing Like That is supposed to be an inside look at bodily functions, but his fanciful, wildly colorful, pulsating, slithering snakelike figures are jaw-droppingly exciting to watch. Some of the goopier ones are like Silly Putty gone mad as they melt and expand and worm their way through neon-lit tunnels. You won’t be able to take your eyes off the screen.

Just as enticing and yet completely opposite in design is Narimitsu Ozaki’s lovely Now and Before, in which an old man living alone reacts to the high-speed life of modern Japan. Glorious shots of the man sitting quietly in his sun-drenched room are counterbalanced by shots of shadowy figures whooshing by on a busy Tokyo street. The gentle soundtrack is of a lute being plucked and Ozaki’s drawings of the old man in closeup are wonderfully expressive.

Charming is the word for Greta Scheing’s hand-drawn Me & 3, a wistful fantasy about friendship. A skeleton finally gets the nerve to leave his home and meets three teeny-voiced rabbits who take him to heart, pointing out that one should accept friends for what they are. The animation is beautifully rendered and the story’s sentiments strike chords.

Very different and yet just as engrossing is Hayley Morris’s Undone, a stop-motion animation in which an old man who’s trying to recall objects from his fading memory is presented as a fisherman in a roiling sea. He pulls in a little tree at one point, a trombone from which fly magical things at another. Children’s blocks get hauled in, too, with a picture of a little girl popping up out of the top of one.

And let’s not leave out the live-action films. David Schachter’s Busted is a funny short about a pair of young ne’er-do-wells who plot the robbery of a convenience store. Their new accomplice is the uncle of one of them who seems to really want to get busted by the cops so he can go back to the slammer that he really loves.

Very different is Ben Powell’s Looking Good, about a Nashville music star wannabe. In it, a young man, who is a pressure washer for his father’s company by day, dreams of being a country music star at night. He dresses the part. He tries to look cool. But so far, he has only been able to get gigs at the local road house in his small Southern town. Powell’s film is a monument to perseverance and hope.

The wider world is not ignored in the show either. Jon Betz spent last July as an aid worker among villagers in northern Uganda where 20 years of guerrilla war has displaced more than 1.6 million people. With humor and compassion, Betz’s documentary memorize-you-saw-it records the lives of the many people he met who are trying to build new lives.

Half a world away, Marian Jimenez returned to her native Costa Rica for La Jaula (The Cage). Her sweet, subtitled film explores the changing dynamics of a household after the young daughter is given a pair of birds and the grownups find they are suddenly catering to the feathered additions.

Other films worth a look at the festival include Gretta Johnson’s Flute Babies, in which gaily colored red, yellow, blue and purple blobby figures pop out of a cat’s flute and take over the life of an alligator; Vanessa Appleby’s brightly colored animated Rise and Shine Recycle Time is the most entertaining public service announcement about the importance of protecting the environment that you are ever likely to see.

The RISD Film Animation Video Senior Show 2008 will begin May 14 at 7 p.m. and continue through May 17 in the RISD Auditorium. Tickets, at the door, are $5; $3 with a student ID.

mjanuson@projo.com