Bill Plympton

Despite his occasional flirtations with the mainstream—be it the Oscar-nominated short Your Face in the late ’80s, a series of Trivial Pursuit commercials in the early ’90s, or 2005’s Kanye West “Heard ’Em Say” music video—animator Bill Plympton has remained something of an outside but influential figure in the animation world. It’s a position he takes ample advantage of: Plympton exercises tremendous creative control over his work, going so far as to personally illustrate and color all 30,000 frames of his feature-length animations in his sketchy, vibrant pencil style. His fifth feature, the Lynchian, dialogue-free Idiots And Angels, continues that tradition. Before premièring the film at Sundance next year, Plympton is doing a test screening of Idiots here in Chicago.

The A.V. Club: You’ve said the perfect film has no dialogue. Is Idiots And Angels a perfect film?
Bill Plympton: You know, the word “perfect”—it’s a dangerous word. Because I don’t like perfect films. I think that’s what Pixar is trying to do, make the perfect film. And I like mistakes; I like weird accidents. It’s like having a lover. You don’t want a woman who’s perfect because you don’t want every hair in place. You want her to be human; you want mistakes. That’s what’s endearing. And perfection is not endearing. So I hope I don’t make the perfect film. I hope I make a film that is memorable, engaging, provocative, and that feels like it was made by an imperfect person, which is me. [Laughs.]
AVC: You’ve done ads in the past. Would you ever completely sell out?
BP: Oh, I’m a total whore! I’m a total animation whore. There’s no question about that. I love doing commercials. They’re quick, they’re short, and the money is almost always good. And they get seen by a lot of people.
AVC: You wouldn’t care if your fans called you a sellout?
BP: No. I think they know I’m a sellout. One of my great heroes is Frank Capra, and he is a total populist. And I think that’s a compliment, to be called a populist. I do not like filmmaking that is elitist, snobby, or intellectual. I think people who do commercials are generally populist-type people and you can count me as one of them.
AVC: You made a documentary on Walt Curtis that was recently re-released with Gus Van Sant’s Mala Noche. What attracted you to making a documentary on him?
BP: He went to the same high school that I did, and I’ve been a fan of his poetry since I first heard him read a poem about him having sex with his neighborhood dog. I thought that was a pretty gutsy poem to do—a lot of sex and a lot of humor, which is very similar to my animation. I thought this guy should have a bigger audience, because even though Mala Noche was somewhat of a hit, people still don’t know who Walt Curtis is. And I didn’t do it for the money—I knew a documentary about an elderly gay poet is not the biggest market in film. And I sort of did it for posterity. I think this guy is a unique person and he should be recorded.
AVC: You’ve said you’re not a very poetic animator. Did he have an appreciation for your cartoons?
BP: He hates them. He’s a very cynical guy and he’s very hard to get a compliment out of. I think one or two of my films he likes but generally he always says bad things about my films and quite frankly, oftentimes I think he’s wrong. But that’s his prerogative as an artist.
AVC: Is the lack of dialogue in Idiots And Angels an attempt to put audiences’ minds on the animators instead of the voice talent? You’ve expressed frustration that the public latches onto the three or four voice actors who record lines for a few hours for an animated feature.
BP: Right. Actually, there are a number of reasons why. First of all, I like storytelling that’s purely visual. If you look at a lot of my films, like Guide Dog and Eat, a lot of my hits have no dialogue at all. And I feel that it’s storytelling in a much more primal stage. It’s much more visceral. And also, quite frankly, I’m not a very good writer of dialogue, so that makes it easier for me to tell a story. It’s also harder to sell to foreign countries. If I have a lot of dialogue, then someone has to translate it or dub it and they’re not always getting the right intonation and it’s more expensive and it just feels like there’s a simpler way to tell a story in truly visual terms.
AVC: You’ve also said the human body is the ultimate cliché. How so?
BP: A common joke is to take a cliché, something that everybody understands and is familiar with, and you twist it. So you’re looking for these clichés that are common knowledge, that everybody understands, and obviously the human face is probably the most visual, ultimate cliché. That’s why so much of my humor is based on the human body, because it’s the universal cliché and it’s really easy to do something weird with it. That’s what Salvador Dali and all the great portrait painters do. They all use the human body as a cliché to say something or to attract the audience’s interest. I go a little bit further; I get a little more surreal. I start turning the body literally inside out—pulling the nose off and stuffing it in the eyeballs and things like that.
AVC: What statement does that make?
BP: Well, the statement is this: laugh. Laugh at me, would you please?