Yvette Kaplan, with son Randall and husband Mark at New York premiere of Beavis and Butt-head Do America. Photo by Janet Benn.

Mike Judge is Beavis and Butt-head Do America's director, while Yvette Kaplan is the animation director. Since the film is completely animated, one may ask "What's the difference?" In this case, the answer goes beyond the difference in size and placement of the credits to an instance of real collaboration and shared responsibility for the successful completion of this film.

Directing animation is a story of numbers and counting, but also of passion and energy. The numbers are everywhere: frames, scenes, sequences and clock timings for every tiny hand flick or eye blink for every character in every shot. From the film as a whole down to its separate scenes, each part of the film has to be crafted in time as well as in line. Added to the complexity in this case was the seemingly impossible schedule of less than 12 months from the start of storyboarding to its Christmas 1996 release decided upon by Paramount Pictures.

Mike Judge first created Beavis and Butt-head in his own, independently-made films. Later, he had to convey his vision to a crew of animators through more than 100 five-minute episodes on MTV, and this year, throughout the 75 minutes of the feature film Beavis and Butt-head Do America. In this effort, Yvette Kaplan has been his chief collaborator.

Combining intense listening with respect for his vision, Kaplan has internalized Mike Judge's "boys" so well as to be able to make their every move and gesture express their personalities perfectly. Since the middle of the production of the first season of the series in 1992, she has learned all about the characters directly from Mike as he acts out every new situation or difficult line reading for her. It's almost as if she has become a continuation of the animation lobe in his brain, so that she can almost always decide questions of direction or situation as he would when he's not there.

Since his deal with Fox to create a new series called King of the Hill, he has been splitting his time between his home in Austin, Texas (where he has a sound studio for recording voices) and Los Angeles (where the series is being made), while the movie was being made in New York. Although he was present in the early stages and at key points throughout production, having an alter ego in the form of Yvette Kaplan made possible the film's on-time completion.

A Frustrated Actor
Yvette started as an animator nearly 20 years ago at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where she met her artist husband Mark. They have one son, Randall, who is proving to be a formidable creator in his own right, acting both on stage (at school) and on screen (doing voice work on several animated productions including the B&B series) all by the age of 12.

"What I loved about being an animator," she recalls, "was not the actual act of drawing, but the thinking [that went into it]. I had an unusual career as an animator, because I wasn't often directed. People handed me sheets and a track, and I did it. I never knew this was unusual.

"I guess, I'm a frustrated actor. I have good instincts about who a character is. I can shift gears. I can become different characters."