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