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.