Rated R. Plays nightly at the Ridge Theatre until April 5

Too much is visibly diseased in this mixed-up, muddled-up world. But at least the miscreants behind Spike & Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation concentrate on the infantile horrors of pee, poo, pussy, and chain saws—in roughly that order.

There are plenty of new titles in this fiesta of bad taste, as well as visits from some old friends, as in numerous short episodes of Craig McCracken's "No Neck Joe", the humour of which escapes me completely.

Of the newbies, the most arresting is "Pirate Baby's Cabana Battle Street Fight", a long, intense, mostly black-and-white piece. (Check out the pixilated colour in the shadows.) Animator Paul Robertson's vision draws upon anime, video games of the Super Mario Bros. vintage, and Freudian free association (all those giant octopuses and regenerating fetuses bursting forth—well, it's creepy, dude).

I was also struck by JG Quintel's cracked vision in "2 in the AM PM", a fluid line-drawing study of two slacker clerks who drop acid on the night shift. Even better is "Don't Fuck With Love", a rude ditty set to the elegantly nostalgic pages of an old pop-up book. Brad Neely's spunky "Washington" is also delightfully old-school, applying Milton Glaser–type graphics to absurd mythologies of the first American president, helped out by some English hip-hop: "[He's] six-foot-eight and weighs a fucking tonne".

One could live without all the hacked-off limbs on display here—a peculiarity du jour, for sure (along with a casual mix of misogyny and homophobia). Among the teddy bears and Barbies watching their extremities go extreme, I prefer the colourful critters of "Happy Tree Friends", who don't survive what should be a pleasant trip to the zoo. (Perhaps the nuttiness works because they are animals ogling other animals, but I don't know.)

There's more mayhem afoot (and amouth) in the work of Breehn Burns and Jason Johnson, who deploy a variety of mostly flat, cut-out styles united by the duo's fixation on a Vietnamese kid called Dr. Tran. He is strangely articulate despite being less than a year old, and knows enough to say "No hablo español" when suddenly cast into the otherwise photo-based "Roybertito's", one of my favourite cartoons of recent years. The manically paced faux ad flogs a taco stand from hell, with testimonials in Spanish and English—if that's what it is when a woman with a deep trucker's voice grunts, "Kwessa dillos is mah medicine." Indeed, the whole show is good for what impales you.