Plympton's "Hair High" Watch, Part 2: The Screening Report




Man, Bill Plympton's "Hair High" -- which screened in Portland last Sunday -- was a wicked piece of work.

It has some of the rough edges that will, inevitably, ensue when one man draws all 30,000 animation frames in a single cartoon, but Plympton's visual inventiveness makes most (maybe all) animators look painfully conservative by comparison.




Before the movie, the director told the audience he was aiming for a sort of "super-romanticism" as he created the spooky love triangle between Spud and the two most popular kids at Echo High. This apparently equates to extreme, relentless, often brilliant visual metaphors -- electric beams passing between lovers, smokers hacking up their internal organs, and unprintable sexual image after unprintable sexual image -- that are so much … realer than real that they remind you that high school was little more than a pride-swallowing siege of passion, hormones and frustration.

Consensus among the local animation intelligentsia in attendance was that it was Plympton's best story to date -- and that the high-powered voice talent may give him a level of exposure that's eluded him up to now.

It was a testament to the crowd that the loudest end-credits applause was reserved for Matt Groening -- who has a small voice part that he literally phoned in from New York. "He's probably the richest artist in the world," Plympton crowed. "I think I paid him $300 for this." Pause. "He still hasn’t cashed the check."

You can read my super-frothy screening report for The Oregonian right here .


Posted: Fri - August 6, 2004 at 04:25 PM        

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