Bill Plympton – Master Animator Keeps The Tradition of 2D Art Alive Through Provocative Animated Features Such as Slide

Bill Plympton

Master Animator Keeps The Tradition of 2D Art Alive Through Provocative Animated Features Such as Slide

by Brad Balfour

In all the years I’ve known Bill Plympton, I still don’t quite comprehend how many drawings he’s made in his life. And he does them so they can work wonderfully well in sequence. There’s a certain crazy genius about him and the work he does.

From stories which include Hitler and a half-naked Trump, Plympton has never shied away from controversial stories and characters. Yet the Bill I know rarely has a harsh word for anyone and is never lacking in joy. He’ll be appearing at this year’s Big Apple Comic Con at the New Yorker Hotel, November 23rd, and has recently released Slide, his latest animated feature that’s also something of a musical.

Born April 30, 1946, in Portland, Oregon, the 78-year-old was raised on a farm in nearby Oregon City with five siblings providing the roots of an odd life. Then, from ’64 to ’68, he studied Graphic Design at Portland State University, where he was a film society member. In ’68, he transferred to New York City’s School of Visual Arts, where he majored in cartooning and graduated in 1969.

When we first met, he was a cartoonist with a political strip. “Plympton,” running in the SoHo Weekly News which began in 1975. Eventually it was syndicated in over 20 newspapers. Plympton’s illustrations and cartoons have been published in The New York Times and the weekly newspaper The Village Voice, as well as in the magazines Vogue, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Penthouse and National Lampoon.

In 1988, his animated short “Your Face” was Oscar-nominated for Best Animated Short Film. He did other animated shorts, too, including “25 Ways to Quit Smoking” [1989] and “Enemies” [1991], the latter of which was part of the Animania series on MTV, where many of his shorts were shown.

In ’91, Plympton won the Prix Spécial du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival for “Push Comes to Shove” which was featured on MTV’s animated series, Liquid Television. The next year, his self-financed first full-length animated feature, The Tune, debuted at Sundance Film Festival. His work also appeared on the 1992/’93 Fox comedy series, The Edge. In '93, he also made his first live action film, J. Lyle and later in 2016, the mockumentary, Hitler’s Folly.

Distant relative actress Martha Plimpton served as associate producer on his animated feature, Hair High [2004], doing much of the casting which included her father Keith Carradine and uncle David. “Guard Dog” [2004] was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

Plympton’s 2008 80-minute feature, Idiots and Angels – entirely without dialogue – premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was presented by legendary animator Terry Gilliam. In 2011, director Alexia Anastasio released a doc on Plympton – Adventures in Plymptoons! – direct-to-DVD and through video-on-demand. Then, Plympton collaborated with film critic, Perry Chen, on “Ingrid Pitt: Beyond the Forest,” a 2011 short, animated film about the noted actress and Holocaust survivor.

All that served to get Plympton the opportunity to animate the opening couch gag for the Simpsons episodes “Beware My Cheating Bart” in 2012, “Black Eyed, Please” in 2013, “Married to the Blob” in 2014, “Lisa the Veterinarian” in 2016, “22 for 30” in 2017, “3 Scenes Plus a Tag from a Marriage” in 2018, “Manger Things” in 2021 and “One Angry Lisa” in 2022. He also did as well as the menus and packaging for the Season 19 DVD. Thanks to his old friend and fellow Portland, Oregon, native Matt Groening, he reached his largest audiences ever.

Other productions included contributing animation and graphics to a computer game collection, “Take Your Best Shot,” in 1995. He also published a comic book in 2003, The Sleazy Cartoons of Bill Plympton. In 2005, Plympton animated a music video for Kanye West’s “Heard ‘Em Say.” The following year, he created the music video for “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Don’t Download This Song.” Plympton contributed animation to the 2006 History Channel series, 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America, to illustrate the Shays’ Rebellion. Together with other independent New York City animators, he has released two DVDs of animated shorts, both titled Avoid Eye Contact. He also directed the segment “On Eating and Drinking” in the 2014 animated film, The Prophet, adapted from Kahlil Gibran’s book.

In 2018, Plympton created a series of videos for The New York Times called “Trump Bites.” One of the series, “Trump and Putin: A Love Story,” depicts Trump and Putin kissing half-naked. Controversial as ever, some critics said the video implied that gay relationships were inherently comic and immoral.

Bill then turned to Kickstarter to speed up production on Slide, his new animated feature in the works. Bill drew his inspiration for Slide from his life, growing up in Oregon, playing the slide guitar. He loves country music, especially the music of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline. It took more than two years to complete Slide, but a successful Kickstarter campaign was going to bring Bill’s newest film out in 2021.

Then the pandemic hit.

It seems your Wikipedia page has not been updated, because it talked about a movie coming out in 2022.

Well, because of Covid, I had to drop the movie and make money. Usually, I do a lot of lectures and film festivals at movie theaters. Because of Covid, I ran out of money. [So I did] music videos and things like that. Then I picked it up again in about 2022. 

I’ll tell you a little bit about the new film called Slide – which is now out. It’s about a slide guitar player – it’s a cowboy film, a Western – who comes into this corrupt lumberjack town and cleans up all the corruption in town with his music. He doesn’t use guns or whips or knives or anything like that. He uses his music to create a better town. It’s as if Mel Brooks was an animator. This is what he would do. It’s not for kids. There are prostitutes in there, a lot of bloody violence. It’s really something very different, very unique, and that’s why I’m really excited about the film. It’s also a musical.

It has six new songs from Maureen McElheron. I’ve been working with her since I first moved to New York. You probably met her in my early days. We had a band. We played a bunch of clubs, and I played slide guitar – she sang the songs. She did the song for Your Face. She did the music for The Tune [1992] and the music for I Married a Strange Person! [1997]. She did a lot of my music for a lot of my films.

Somewhere online, you were selling some of your cels and art and stuff. Hopefully, you didn’t have to sell a lot of it. I’d rather you see it be donated or get paid by one archive, because there must be a million people who want to study what you’ve been doing.

Yeah, that’s a very good point. The selling of the originals actually is a really good deal, and that is very popular – more popular than I expected. If you’ve been to my studio, I have a whole wall of boxes of art that I’m willing to sell, like $200 each, $300 each. So it’s a good way to raise funds and keep my studio somewhat orderly [laughs] without all these boxes of artwork.

It’s a good thing that at events like these Comic Cons, you can be signing and doing pictures – you are quite in demand.

I like the Big Apple [Comic Con] because there’s a lot of fans of mine who live in New York. Truthfully, the biggest sellers are Your Face [1987] artwork and The Simpsons – people love The Simpsons. There’s a lot of fans in New York City for Simpsons art and I have a lot of original Simpsons artwork.

But the interesting thing is that the animation that’s on The Simpsons is all digital. In other words, they created it on their laptop or computer. I’m the last guy who actually makes drawings on paper, so I’m the only guy who has Simpsons artwork that is legit – real artwork that is in the show. That gives it a very high resale potential; it makes the artwork very valuable.

What’s the secret to how you are able to make so much art – your hand can be drawing while you’re sleeping!?

Yeah, that’s not a bad idea. That would be good. Sometimes I even draw left-handed – I’m basically right-handed, but if my hand gets tired, I’ll draw left-handed, and it actually helps speed up the process.

It sounds like whatever your assistants do, you still do the majority of the real creation there.

Let me tell you exactly what I do, because there’s some confusion. A lot of people think I have inbetweeners and people who do the artwork. I do the story, of course. I do the storyboards, all the character design, all the background design and the layout. I do all the animation – 100% of everything there is mine. I did all the drawings, and I colored the drawings, too. I do all the coloring.

There are two reasons [why] I do that. One is, it’s cheaper that way. I don’t pay a lot of money to hire other artists. The other reason – it’s more fun. I love drawing all day long. That’s my passion in life: drawing all day long. So it works out pretty well for me. As an independent, I don’t have a lot of money, and I have to finance everything myself. As an independent, I have to keep the budget low.

It must be tough to resist the urge to train a computer to be you.

I’m really bad with computers. [laughs] In fact, I don’t even know how to answer my emails, so I have someone to do it. I’m so busy drawing, I’ve never really learned how to use a computer. It’s a bad situation; I’m not proud of that. But it’s just the reality of my artistic life.

You are married and have had a son. How old is he?

He’s 12 years old, and he loves drawing. He wants to be a game designer. He wants to design games and is actually doing one right now.

So that could become your next source of income. He could game-ify a lot of your stories and works.

That’s a great idea. I’ll tell him you said that.

Yeah. By the time he’s 14, you could be sitting back and smoking your cigar while games are generating income. [laughs]

Right, that’s true.

It’s mystifying how you come up with some of these wacky ideas. And then, forget about coming up with them, following the path of your narratives is a whole other thing.

Well, just so you know, I live in New York City, and New York City is basically a cartoon city. There are so many ideas on every block, and I carry around a sketch pad with me to write down the ideas and the weird things I see. That’s where a lot of ideas come from.

You’ve done so many films. It’s hard to say which one people think was the weirdest and which one people think is the best for kids. Which one do you think could be adapted to live action?

Okay, let me start. My favorite film is probably Your Face because that really put me on the map. That really opened me up to the whole animation industry. My favorite feature film is Cheatin' [2013], which I did about 10 years ago. It’s a really beautiful film, I love it. The weirdest film is I Married a Strange Person!, which actually was the biggest hit. It was my biggest success. Can I tell you a story about it?

Absolutely.

Okay, well, I Married a Strange Person! came out in [1998] and got invited to the Sundance Film Festival. Which is really special, because generally they don’t like animated films. So we showed it, the audience went crazy for it, standing ovations, they loved it. I thought, “I’m going to make some money on this film.” But no distributors bought it, and I thought, “Oh, this is terrible.” You’ve been to Sundance, right? You know the buses that go around the city?

Yeah.

Anyway, I was on the bus, and I saw the head of Lionsgate Films; I knew him from somewhere. I walked up to him, and I said, “Hey! How’re you doing? I’m Bill Plympton, remember me? I did a film, I Married a Strange Person!. Have you had a chance to see it yet?” He said “No, I’ve been busy. There’s been so many films to see. I don’t have time to see I Married a Strange Person. So I was pretty depressed.

Then this snowboard dude jumps on the bus, with snow dripping down his face, beard, and just wet from head to toe. He says “Hey, you’re Bill Plympton! Duuude, I loved I Married a Strange Person! That’s the best film I’ve seen all year!” He then jumps off the bus and goes down the hill. That’s the last time I saw that guy, but the guy from Lionsgate said, “Okay, I guess I’d better watch your film.” He loved it, bought it, and it made a lot of money. It was one of my most successful films. All thanks to that snowboard dude. I don’t know what his name was, but he saved my ass.

Of all the films you’ve made, are there any you’d like to see made in live action?

Not really. I really love animation. Animation, to me, is the best format for telling stories. However, I am working on a book now, a Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas kind of book, that I think would make a great live-action feature, or animated film. It’s called Sky High. I don’t know when it’s going to be coming out, but it’ll be coming out probably in the fall sometime.

Would you want to have one of your ideas made into a digitally-created animated film, just to see how it looks?

Oh, yeah. No, I like Pixar films. I like Disney films. I have no problem with computer animation. In fact, I think computer animation really saved the animation industry. Because of Pixar and Dreamworks, animated films now are huge, huge box office. In fact, something like Avatar, which is really a computer film, they [made] like two billion dollars or something. I think they’re the most successful art form in a long time. So I’m perfectly happy to see computer animation used for films.

Did you ever think you would be considered that far ahead of your time?

Well, I wasn’t ahead of my time, I was behind. I’m a dinosaur in the business. I think people will start appreciating hand-drawn animation a little bit more. Someone like [Hayao] Miyazaki [co-founder of Studio Ghibli], his films are incredibly popular. And, of course, The Simpsons is very popular. They’re all hand drawn. So I think there’s still a market for those kinds of films. But certainly, the computer itself is so, so massively popular.

Have you seen the films of Irish born Tomm Moore? [The Secret of Kells (2009), Song of the Sea (2014) and Wolfwalkers (2020), were all nominated for Oscars] They’re a mix of hand-drawn and digital.

Yes, that’s Cartoon Saloon [co-founded with Nora Twomey and Paul Young]. I visited his studio, actually; he’s a really nice guy. I really celebrate his [work], it’s very different. He was like me: he started out as an illustrator, doing illustrations for magazines. Then he got into animation, and it became really popular, very successful, and I’m really happy for his success.

Your Hitler film, Hitler’s Folly [2016] must have been your most controversial.

It was, yeah. Actually, my most controversial film was “Trump Bites” [2018-2019]. I did a series of short films for The New York Times about Trump and the things he said. I would take his dialogue – which is crazy, as you know – and then I would do animation to accent the surrealism of what he was saying. I got so much hate mail – oh my God, tons of it. [Conservative pundit] Sean Hannity showed the film on Fox and man, I was inundated with this hate mail, death threats, and stuff like that. It was pretty ugly. It’s still really ugly stuff.

That was my most controversial film, I’d say. I only did one season of it, but it was the highest-rated show on the New York Times online programming. In a way, that’s good; but in a way, it’s because I was so controversial.

But anyway, the Hitler film I thought was a great idea. Again, Mel Brooks made a film about Hitler, [1967’s The Producers; “Mel Brooks: To Be or Not to Be” music video (1983)] and so did Charlie Chaplin [The Great Dictator (1940)]. Disney made a Hitler film [Jojo Rabbit, dir. Taika Waititi (2019)]. What I was doing is not that controversial. There have been a lot of Hitler comedies before, so I didn’t get too much feedback.

Whether it’s a sad thing, or a good thing, Hitler is such a crazy concept that it can be made into so many movies and books. Nobody, still to this day, believes he could have really been a real thing. Except that he was.

Yes, you’re right. If his art career had taken off, if he had gotten into animation, he never would have been a dictator. He would have been a dictator-animator, but I don’t think he would have been a political dictator.

Norman Spinrad wrote a book, The Iron Dream, which envisions Hitler as a science fiction writer. You should look that up. You’d appreciate that. 

Yeah, I think I would.

So what is your opinion on Rick and Morty? What do you think about that, all the controversy?

That’s really well-written. I don’t think the artwork is so good, but I love the writing and the imagination. Another one I like a lot is SpongeBob [Squarepants].  I think SpongeBob is definitely a takeoff on Bugs Bunny and Warner Brothers cartoons. The humor, the visual craziness. And it’s all visual humor, whereas most [cartoons] are word humor. I like visual humor the best.

I did think one answer to your question of what films of mine would be great for kids? For the Cartoon Network, I did a Christmas special, “12 Tiny Christmas Tales” [2001.] It’s a half-hour, and the reviews were off the wall. They were like, “Oh, this is brilliant! This is the best thing ever! The best Christmas special ever!” Then the Cartoon Network put it in their vaults, and they never showed it again.

I was going to say, “Why aren’t you a perennial like Charles Schultz?

Exactly. It really was a unique Christmas special. We’ve been trying to get them to show it again, but it’s hard. But at least it shows in other countries. In Argentina, it’s a big success. They show it every Christmas, and people say, “You did ‘12 Tiny Christmas Tales’! All right, dude!”

Do you ever think about doing your own Christmas [project] and distributing it on your own?

Maureen McElheron wants me to do that. She has a story that she thought would be a great Christmas special. But it’s hard to sell something like that, unless I had connections with Netflix or Hulu or Apple, or something like that. I don’t have those connections.

You don’t have a vast array of agents and managers. [Laughs] And you can be controversial.

No, I’m independent. And I do adult animation. They think there’s no market for that. So, it’s a very difficult business to be in.

So, what do you think about what happened to wildly successful cartoonist Scott Adams who made some questionable comments about African Americans which caused his “Dilbert” strip to be dropped by his syndicate?

And he’s one of the cartoonists I liked the most. I love his cartoons. They’re not only funny; they’re of a dry, deadpan kind of humor, and I like that. But why would he say that? I guess he felt he was so popular that he can say anything and not get blowback on it. But yeah, that’s a stupid thing to do. One thing that disappointed me was the troubles that John Lasseter had with Disney. You probably read about it, right?

Yeah.

Without him, animation would be a much deader business. Pixar is the great studio of the last two or three decades, and they single handedly raised animation to the art form that it is now. That’s all due to John Lasseter [who was chief creative officer of Pixar Animation Studios, Walt Disney Animation Studios, and Disneytoon Studios, as well as Principal Creative Advisor for Walt Disney Imagineering]. He is the genius of geniuses, and I think he deserves a better fate than that. He joined this other studio, Skydance [Animation] and did a film called Luck. It wasn’t very good. I don’t know what happened; it was really a bad film. But I will always be indebted to him for making animation such a powerful, powerful art form.

For more info go to: https://plymptoons.com/

To see Bill at Big Apple Comic Con go to: https://bigapplecc.com/

Copyright ©2024 PopEntertainment.com. All rights reserved. Posted: November 7, 2024.

Photo 1 by Brad Balfour © 2024. All rights reserved.

Picture 2 © 2024. Courtesy of Bill Plympton. All rights reserved.