The Making of "Mutant Aliens" by Bill Plympton

Page 2.

Layouts are rough drawings that depict the characters and action for each shot in the film. I would start from the opening title sequence and very roughly lay out each scene. Often, I would expand from the book if the story or humor let me. Where the book had about 1200 panel drawings, the layouts came to around 1400 shots and it took about a month to do all the layouts. This step of the production is also where I get a rough sense of the length of the film. I roughly timed out the length of each layout and it came to a total length of about 60 minutes, much too short for a feature, I worried.

In the fall of 1999, I began the first animation. I chose the "nose planet" scene to start with because it was fairly simple, design-wise, and it's only 10 minutes long, so there wouldn't be a problem with "character design slippage." (I've noticed in my past films that the characters would visually evolve throughout the film, because each time I redrew them, I would try to make them better-looking, so at the beginning they would be less refined and clunky, and by the end of the film, they would be quite elegant.) The "nose planet" scene is a ruse invented by Earl Jensen to gain the confidence of Dr. Frubar and get his revenge. So I needed to invent a fantastic planet where he meets space alien characters. Now, for many years there have been wonderful depictions in films of bizarre and strange planets in space, so I felt quite at a loss as to how to make this planet unique from all the others. Then, I had the idea of making the inhabitants resemble body parts (which, if you've seen my films, is somewhat natural). I chose the nose aliens as the good guys and eye aliens as the bad guys, with fingers, feet and hands as workers, a mouth as the evil king and a tongue as the sadistic executioner.

I began to hire the artists for the coloring of the copied cels. My favorite head of production, Signe Baumane, was busy working on her own animated short, "Natasha". Two wonderful women, Jennifer Senko and Delphine Burrus, came in to head up the production. I hired the cel painters from my old alma mater, the School of Visual Arts. I started them off with a salary of $5-7 an hour, then if they were able to do the work, I raised them to $10-12 an hour. Now, many people might think that these are slave wages, and it's true, I don't pay top dollar like Disney or Dreamworks. However, this is a much different situation - I'm not a giant corporate media empire, I pay for these films myself, and, with the exception of "Mondo Plympton", all of my features have lost money (although I do hope in the future they will bring in extra income). Also, this is a wonderful opportunity for these students to learn how an animated feature is made - it's also part-time work that looks great on their resumes.

"In all my past films, the stars have all been human. The challenge of this project was to create alien creatures that somehow resembled normal animals, yet were still original, mutant-looking."

One of the fun parts of creating a film is designing the characters. In all my past films, the stars have all been human. The challenge of this project was to create alien creatures that somehow resembled normal animals, yet were still original, mutant-looking. For the book, I had seven aliens, but I found that the spider was very unappealing and not fun to draw, so he was turned into a long-legged frog. Then, the furball character was dropped altogether - it was too similar to a Sesame St. character, and I felt there were too many aliens. So, by time I began animating the aliens, the six characters were defined: "Furd", the flying fish; "QT", the leader and most vicious of the group; "Bubbles", the worm-like mutant; "Ali", the alligator/lizard/dinosaur; "Stretch", the long-legged frog; and "Lance", the nervous, spear-nosed pig. Many people, after reading the book, thought that I'm an animal-rights activist and this film is a political treatise against animal testing. However, I believe that animal testing is important to medical and scientific developments, and just felt that animals would be a refreshing change of pace for me, and a new challenge. Another animation section I began early on was the song "You Can't Drag Race With Jesus". I'd always wanted to make a live-action short with that title - it's a quirky idea. I felt that two loves of Southern-Baptist types were hot-rod cars and Jesus, and it seemed natural to put them together in a gospel song. Since there was a revivalist preacher in the film, I could fit it in there. I'd intended to add a gag about the preacher handling poisonous snakes, but instead of lethal, scary serpents, this preacher handled earthworms. Well, the gag took too long to develop, and it probably wouldn't have been understood outside the U.S., so I replaced it with the "Drag Race" song. I also released the song as a short film to allow me to attend the Annecy Animation festival. It wasn't accepted there, but it did go on to a very successful festival run, and I made money on the short to help pay for the feature. It's common knowledge that I finance my own films. I've always worked that way and will continue to do that, because it's paid off and I've built up a nice library of film that I can continue to sell. Often times, however, paying off these features has put me into debt and I expected to fall into debt with "Aliens", too. But fortunately, Atom Films came to the rescue. I signed a deal with them to broadcast my library of films over the Internet for a nice chunk of change, to help defray my mounting expense from the production of "Mutant Aliens".

Also, I was able to document each step of the filmmaking process, from story idea to selling the completed film as a 50-part "Plympton Diaries", which is now being broadcast on the Atom Films Website. So, each week, one can tune into Atom Films and see which step of the filmmaking process I'm at. It's a wonderful look at the art and business of animation for students or fans of cartoons. The address is: www.plympton.atomfilms.com/

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