The Screengrab

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).

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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.

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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.

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