Joking, Dreaming, or Drunk?
In 1990, Matt Groening and MTV's John Payson and Abby Terkuhle ran into Plympton at a party. When he announced that he was making a feature, and that he would be animating the whole thing himself and financing it out of his own pocket, they thought he was joking. Or dreaming. Or drunk. They were wrong to doubt him. Bill completed The Tune, his film about an aspiring songwriter, on schedule and within budget, in 1992.

How does he do it? First, he draws fast. Plympton's style, going back to his days as a political cartoonist for New York's Soho Weekly News in the 70s, is loose and squiggly. Second, he puts in long hours. "My social life does sorta get sacrificed to my animation habit," he admits. He rises daily at 6:30 a.m., goes straight to his animation table, and works for 10 to 16 hours. He does not generally take weekends and holidays off. Third, it's not his style to use a lot of inbetweens; he often works on threes and fours, meaning he keeps the same drawing on screen for a sixth of a second instead of a twelfth or a twenty-fourth.

Animation on The Tune was a three-step process. Plympton animated scenes on paper. Assistants cut the characters out with X-acto knives and then mounted them on cels. Plympton then repenciled, adding shadows, detail and color. Animation on Strange Person is a more traditional, two-step process. Pencil drawings are xeroxed onto cels and painted on the back "opaqued," in animation parlance). "It's quicker this way," he says, "and I like the look."

It's a lot of hard work to animate, finance and promote these films himself, but Plympton wouldn't have it any other way; it gives him the artistic freedom and the independence he wants and needs. Starting with Strange Person, he'll even be handling his own distribution. To give himself more visibility, he's also launched a web site. "Actually, New York University initially contacted us about being part of their site," says Plympton's assistant John Holderried. "Mike Dougherty, a student in NYU's graduate animation program did the HTML and worked with Bill on the layout and the links. It was fun to put it together, to look for other related sites. I was surprised how much Plympton material was already on the web."

Storyboard sketch, I Married A Strange Person. © Bill Plympton.

Plympton's financing is ingenious, and extremely well thought out. His master plan for funding The Tune is a case in point. He made some money from his string of successful, award-winning shorts (How to Kiss, One of Those Days, 25 Ways to Quit Smoking, Plymptoons) and from animating commercials, but still didn't have enough to make a feature. He then decided to complete segments of the film, submit them to festivals, market them as shorts, and plow the profits back into the feature. This accounts for The Tune's episodic structure, as different parts needed to stand alone.

There's more money available for the new feature, so it contains only one segment originally released as a short, How to Make Love to a Woman. It appears in the film as an instructional film that one of the characters is watching. Strange Person is more story driven, though like most Plympton projects, difficult to summarize, but here goes:

When newlywed Grant Boyer is zapped by strange radiation from a TV satellite dish, he grows an extra brain lobe capable of making his fantasies real. Grant turns his wife Kerry into several different women during sex. He makes bugs come streaming out of his mother-in-law's mouth. A demonstration of his abilities on a TV talk show attracts the unwanted attentions of a megalomaniac media maven, a washed-up comedian, and a power-mad Colonel. To stay alive and out of their clutches, Grant will need all the help he can get, including that of his somewhat bewildered bride. Will she stick with him, for better or for worse, even though he's become... a strange person?