The Screengrab : bill plympton

Cartoon Fever: The World’s Greatest Animated Shorts (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 22:00:00 GMT

ONE OF THOSE DAYS (1988)

With his distinctive squiggly style and surreal, only-in-animation humor, Bill Plympton’s prolific output is so consistently good it’s hard to pick just one representative sample. This being a shorts list, it’s easy enough to eliminate his features (even really short ones like his musical, The Tune, which comes in at a trim 69 minutes and features the insanely catchy "In Flooby Nooby."). After that, though, it gets tricky: should I highlight his 1987 Oscar-nominated short, Your Face, MTV/animation festival faves like How To Kiss or 25 Ways To Quit Smoking or one of his videos for the likes of Kanye West and “Weird Al” Yankovic? Ultimately, I picked One of Those Days simply because it was the most representative stand-alone Plymptoon I could find on YouTube (though it's also included, along with the other three aforementioned shorts, in Mondo Plympton, which compiles nine of the animator’s finest squiggly moments for your own private Plymptopalooza).

SUSPICIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES (1984)

Jim Blashfield has the style of an exploding junk shop, with every bit of detritus somehow landing in just the right place. After applying that style to other films and a number of music videos, this story of a man who got a little too curious about the world hiding inside the dark corners of our world remains his masterpiece. But we're confident that someone will be calling him any minute now with an offer to finance the film version of The Crying of Lot 49 that we know he's got in him.

THE TENDER GAME (1958)

The history of animation has a number of brother acts -- the Disneys, the Fleischers, the Quays -- but the Hubleys probably have a hammerlock on the title of First Family of American Animation. John used to work for the big boys: he labored at Disney Studios (where his credits include the "Rite of Spring" episode in Fantasia) until he left over ill feelings stemming from the infamous animators' strike of 1941, after which he created Mr. Magoo for UPA. Hubley was driven out of the majors after running afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee -- what were they expecting him to do, name Foghorn Leghorn as a Trotskyite? -- and began turning out a long stream of gorgeously imaginative animated shorts with his wife, Faith. The Tender Game is a high point and a representative example of their taste for stylized, childlike imagery, music and narration that seems to have sidled in from the nearest beatnik coffee house. After John's death in 1977 -- their last collaboration was the 1977 Doonesbury Special for TV -- Faith worked for many years to turn out the career-apotheosis feature The Cosmic Eye, on which her daughter, Emily, served as associate producer. Emily's first feature, a mixture of live action and animation called The Toe Tactic. premiered on the festival circuit earlier this year.

THANK YOU MASK MAN (1971)

All his life, Lenny Bruce desperately wanted to get into the movies, but the only thing that he had in common with the people who ran the studios in his day was that neither they nor he could ever quite figure out how to use Lenny Bruce in a movie. Lenny's own attempts to star himself in an independent production, such as the infamous Dance Hall Racket (directed by Phil Tucker, the guy whose Robot Monster gave us the indelible image of a guy wearing a gorilla suit with a diver's helmet), never got beyond the camp embarrassment stage, and even the feature length filmed concert (reduced as The Lenny Bruce Performance Film) wasn't made until Bruce was so far gone into his obsession with his own legal case to be very funny. It wasn't until after Bruce's death that the director John Magnuson managed to pull together this animated version of one of Bruce's greatest stand-up fantasies (about the Lone Ranger), which he may have done as penance for directing the Performance Film. That movie often played the midnight circuit in tandem with this cartoon (whose ratty-looking animation is perfectly in sync with Bruce's grungy-minded satire). It was a useful pairing: the live action feature showed Bruce as a broken man, and the cartoon revealed just what had been lost in the breaking.

VINCENT (1982)

Tim Burton conceived and co-directed (with Rick Heinrichs) this uncannily beautiful example of his pop-Gothic style, captured in black and white stop-motion animation. (It was made at a time when Burton, not yet a live-action director, was laboring in the animation department at Disney, where he managed to do little but confuse his employers.) Whatever you think of Burton's later work, it's hard to argue that he didn't nail most of what he had to give in these six and a half minutes. And he made Vincent Price, who had the honor of narrating this tribute to himself, a very happy man.

WHEN THE DAY BREAKS (1999)

Wendy Tilby wrote this strange, beautiful cartoon about a pig who experiences a memento mori when she witnesses the death of a chicken while out shopping for groceries. It was directed by Tilby and Amanda Forbis. No description can really do full justice to its striking look and emotional impact, which is a testament to just how good and just how unearthly good animation can be.

Click Here For Part One, Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

On-Line Highlights from This Year's "The Animation Show"

Phil Nugent — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT

The fourth season of The Animation Show, the periodic mini-festival of animated shorts compiled by Mike Judge (with fellow animator Don Hertzfeldt, who worked as co-curator of the previous collections, sitting out this one), has begun its progress around the country. As in previous years, the selection is widely varyied in both style and content, making room for one elegant illustrated reading of a poem by Billy Collins and three different episodes featuring a creature called Yompi, the Crotch-Biting Sloup. (If you think Yompi's adventures pretty much write themselves, we can only say...well, yeah.) A couple of the most pleasing films are Grant Orchard's Love Sport: Paint Balling (above) and Western Spaghetti from the stop-motion animator PES. Both are simple, short, and eye-popping, which is to say they're also beautifully scaled to the computer screen.

Also included is Bill Plympton's latest short, Hot Dog, the tragicomic tale of a dog who yearns to join the gang at the firehouse. It helps wash away the bitter aftertaste from Idiots and Angels, Plympton's latest misbegotten attempt to stretch his quirky talents out to feature length. The first minute of the new film is available at YouTube, where it's billed as a "trailer":

Tribeca Film Festival Review: "Idiots & Angels"

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The animator Bill Plympton doesn't make cartoons for kids; kids wouldn't stand for this stuff. Plympton's hand-drawn, independently produced features depend on the kind of tolerance that adult audiences, especially those who love animation, can be counted on to extend to something when they know how much tedious hard work when into its making. Plympton is basically a gagman with a drawing board. He started making noise in animation festivals more than twenty years ago with a string of punchy short films (Your Face; 25 Ways to Quit Smoking; How to Kiss) that were boiled down to nothing but their visual jokes. The best of them were combustibly funny, especially if you saw them slotted in between a few "poetic" animated shorts, and their handmade roughness was part of their charm. But then Plympton started turning out feature films (beginning with the 1992 The Tune, which cannibalized a number of his early shorts), and they've been padded-out, deflated non-events, with vast acreage of undecorated blank space on the screen; Plympton has so little compositional sense that his bare backgrounds make you feel as if you're not getting a lot of movie for your money. He doesn't even give you much to look at while you're killing time during the long wait for the next joke to show up and bomb.

His latest, Idiots & Angels, shows a little more care for what's in the frame, but in a self-negating way: parts of it look cross-hatched to death. It's dark and heavy in a way that exentuates the film's joylessness. (The same can be said for Plympton's weirdest stylistic tic, his way of giving the appearance of too-solid form to translucent objects. When the hero is in the shower, the water drops are like bullets pouring into his body; thick cigarette smoke rising to the ceiling looks like something you could use to shimmy up to heaven.) The story, which didn't threaten to heave into view until people had already started pouring out of the theater as if the joint were in flames, involves the hero's growing a pair of wings, and the closest the movie comes to invoking the spirit of Plympton's short cartoons at their best is when he starts taking advantage of them. The miracle doesn't move him to become more angelic; a mean bastard by nature, he simply becomes a mean bastard who can fly, and he takes off across town, picking on people from an unreachable height and dive-bombing a woman he spots sunbathing topless. By the time this high point arrives, the movie already feels as if it's sitting on your head.