Bill Plympton came up with the concept for Guard Dog after witnessing a dog barking at a pigeon in a park one day. Guard Dog image © 2004 Bill Plympton.

With Guard Dog, the ever-independent Bill Plympton has cooked up one of the simplest and most brilliant comic premises of his career; a dog who won’t stop barking while he’s walking through the park is actually imagining one terrifying scenario after another, involving all the things that surround him — birds, flowers, a cricket — attacking his owner in a fight to the death. The sheer size of the humor quotient in Guard Dog, combined with Plympton’s signature rough-drawing style, have earned the Oscar-winning animator his current Academy distinction. (See February 2005’s Fresh from the Festivals for a brief overview.)

“I was jogging in the park a little over a year ago,” Plympton recalls, “and I saw this dog barking at a pigeon. It just struck me — why is this dog so afraid of a harmless little bird? And the great thing about animation is to be able to go inside this dog’s brain and try and figure out what sort of paranoid scenario he’s imagining of this bird attacking his owner. That was the delight in making the film, creating those crazy dog fantasies. Once I had the concept it was really easy making up all these crazy Fear Factor ideas.

“Then I went back to the dog run and did sketches of all the dogs. The dog I chose was some sort of pug. Of course I exaggerated him a bit, squished him up, made the eyes bigger and the nose smaller.”

Plympton wrote Guard Dog in December 2003, animated it the same month, and did post-production in January. The whole shebang took two and a half months, but as you might guess from counting frames the drawings took only two weeks. “There’s a lot of shortcuts,” Plympton says. “The shot where the dog is bouncing down the street toward the camera is three drawings, recycled. I do that a lot, and you know what? It works.” Indeed, the effect is part of his signature style, and it’s a smart move, humor-wise, when you animate on fours, eights, or even twelves, as Plympton does, things go super fast — and in comedy, speed is half the bang.

Guard Dog is the first film-free product from Plympton Studios. Backgrounds and Plympton’s colored pencil drawings were scanned separately and then composited. “There’s some good to that and some bad,” Plympton says, “but basically the costs were about the same for the whole production. That’s what’s going on for me now — as costs diminish for making a film print from digital, it makes more sense for me to make that transition.”

Reassuringly, Plympton still faced “the same technical crap” this time around. “We had a lot of mistakes, crashes, digital problems. If the black should be blacker, or something should be moved around, I’m involved with that.” Editing was as crucial as ever, and at first the film was overstuffed with gags that later hit the desktop recycle bin. “There was a gag where the dog looked up in the sky and saw this cloud, and the cloud opened like a bomb-bay and bombs started falling on the guy. And then another one was this little caterpillar with a welding mask and a sharpener, who was sharpening the blades of grass — and he tripped the guy with his slime, and he fell on the grass, and it pierced his body. We showed it to a bunch of people, and nobody liked it, so we cut it.”

Plympton has done two more shorts since Guard Dog — The Fan and the Flower — which he’s just finishing, and a sequel to Guard Dog called Guide Dog, where the owner-killing pug returns to help blind people. He’s holding back both shorts for the moment to keep media attention focused on Guard Dog, because the ultimate objective of exploiting all this hype, he says, is to bring attention to his completed and still-unreleased feature Hair High.

“We haven’t signed a domestic deal yet,” Plympton says, “because we felt that the offers we got were not appropriate to the quality of the film. We’re signing a deal for foreign sales, and the film is coming out in France in early April, but for the U.S. we have not done a deal. So the important part of all this media attention on me and Guard Dog is bringing Hair High to people’s consciousness.”

Plympton is bringing a print of Hair High to Los Angeles during Oscar week to screen for potential studio executives. Meanwhile there’s a contest underway at the Plymptoons website where readers are invited to send in pictures of their favorite canine sentries to earn a free copy of Guard Dog. Which brings up the question — Now that the pug represents a potential franchise, has he given his new star an appropriate non-threatening nickname? “He still needs one,” Plympton says. “I may have another contest.”