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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