Bill Plympton | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | American |
Education | Portland State University School of Visual Arts |
Known for | Animation |
Notable work | Your Face , Guard Dog , The Tune , Cheatin' |
Relatives | Martha Plimpton (cousin) |
Signature | |
Bill Plympton (born April 30, 1946) [1] is an American animator, graphic designer, cartoonist, and filmmaker best known for his 1987 Academy Awards-nominated animated short Your Face and his series of shorts featuring a dog character starting with 2004's Guard Dog . [2]
Plympton was born in Portland, Oregon, the son of Wilda Jean (Jerman) and Donald F. Plympton, [3] [4] and was raised on a farm in nearby Oregon City [1] with five siblings: Sally, Tia, Peggy, David and Peter. [4] From 1964 to 1968, he studied Graphic Design at Portland State University, where he was a member of the film society and worked on the yearbook. In 1968, he transferred to the School of Visual Arts [3] in New York City, where he majored in cartooning. He graduated from SVA in 1969. [5]
Plympton's illustrations and cartoons have been published in The New York Times and the weekly newspaper The Village Voice , as well as in the magazines Vogue , Rolling Stone , Vanity Fair , Penthouse , and National Lampoon . His political cartoon strip Plympton, which began in 1975 in the SoHo Weekly News , eventually was syndicated and appeared in over 20 newspapers. [6]
In 1988, his animated short Your Face was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. He also became known for other animated short films, including 25 Ways to Quit Smoking (1989) and Enemies (1991), the latter of which was part of the Animania series on MTV, where many of his other shorts were shown. [7]
In 1991, Plympton won the Prix Spécial du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival for Push Comes to Shove which was featured on MTV's animated series Liquid Television . [8] In 1992, his self-financed, first feature-length animated film, The Tune debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. [7] His work also appeared on the 1992–1993 Fox comedy series The Edge . In 1993, he made his first live action film, J. Lyle.
In 1995, he contributed animation and graphics to a computer game collection, Take Your Best Shot . [9] He also published a comic book in 2003, The Sleazy Cartoons of Bill Plympton.
The actress Martha Plimpton, a distant relative of his, [10] served as associate producer on Plympton's animated feature Hair High (2004), doing much of the casting. The movie's voice cast included her father Keith Carradine and her uncle David Carradine.
Guard Dog (2004) was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. In 2005, Plympton animated a music video for Kanye West's "Heard 'Em Say" and the following year, he created the music video for "Weird Al" Yankovic's "Don't Download This Song". Plympton contributed animation to the 2006 History Channel series 10 Days That Unexpectedly Changed America , to illustrate the events of Shays' Rebellion. Together with other independent New York City animators, he has released two DVDs of animated shorts, both titled Avoid Eye Contact.
Plympton's 2008 80-minute feature, Idiots and Angels presented by Terry Gilliam, had no dialogue. [11] [12] The film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on 26 April 2008, [13]
In 2011, Alexia Anastasio completed a documentary on Plympton's life, Adventures in Plymptoons!, [14] released in September 2012 direct-to-DVD and on video-on-demand. [15]
In 2011, Plympton collaborated with child film critic Perry Chen on Ingrid Pitt: Beyond the Forest, a 2011 short animated film directed by Kevin Sean Michaels, about actress and Holocaust survivor Ingrid Pitt. [16]
Plympton animated the opening couch gag for the Simpsons episodes "Beware My Cheating Bart" in 2012, "Black Eyed, Please" in 2013, "Married to the Blob" in 2014, "Lisa the Veterinarian" in 2016, "22 for 30" in 2017, "3 Scenes Plus a Tag from a Marriage" in 2018, "Manger Things" in 2021 and "One Angry Lisa" in 2022; as well as the menus and packaging for the Season 19 DVD.
Plympton directed the segment "On Eating and Drinking" in the 2014 animated film The Prophet , adapted from Kahlil Gibran's book The Prophet. In 2018, Plympton created a series of videos for The New York Times called “Trump Bites”. One of the series, Trump and Putin: A Love Story, depicts Trump and Putin kissing half-naked. Critics said the video implied that gay relationships were inherently comical and immoral. [17]
In 2020, Plympton released a Kickstarter for his new animated comedy western, Slide. The funding was successful and Plympton had planned on finishing the film by 2022.
A collection of more than 180 Plympton items is held at the Academy Film Archive. [18] The archive has preserved Plympton's films such as Your Face, The Tune, Guard Dog, and The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger. [19]
His films have featured in the Animation Show of Shows including Your Face , Guard Dog, Eat (2001), The Fan and the Flower (2005), and Santa: The Fascist Years (2009). [20] [21] [22] [23] [24]
On December 23, 2011, Plympton married animator/artist/illustrator Sandrine Flament at his sister's house in Oregon. [25] [26] Their son, Lucas, was born in September 2012. [1]
Plympton has stated he has many influences, the biggest being the work of the Walt Disney studio with others including Tex Avery, Bob Clampett, Robert Crumb, Milton Glaser, Charles Addams, Roland Topor, Quentin Tarantino, Frank Capra, Richard Lester, Bob Godfrey, Saul Steinberg, Tomi Ungerer, Jacques Tati, [27] Milt Kahl, [28] Carlos Nine, and Jules Feiffer. [29] He said I Married a Strange Person! "was influenced by Peter Jackson, some of his earlier films ... where he used gore and violence and blood as humor." [30]
Source unless otherwise noted: [42] [43]
The term independent animation refers to animated shorts, web series, and feature films produced outside a major national animation industry.
Courage the Cowardly Dog is an American animated comedy horror television series created by John R. Dilworth for Cartoon Network. It was produced by Dilworth's animation studio, Stretch Films. The eponymous character is a dog who lives with an elderly couple in a farmhouse in the middle of Nowhere, a fictional town in Kansas. In each episode, the trio is thrown into bizarre, frequently disturbing, and often paranormal or supernatural adventures. The series is known for its dark, surreal humor and atmosphere.
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The Animation Show is a touring festival of animated short films that was first held in fall 2003. It was sponsored by MTV, and was created by award-winning animators Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt. Due to its association with MTV, the showcase was not intended for children, as the festival was more aimed at adult audiences, with its main kid-friendly equivalent being Nickelodeon's Nicktoons Film Festival, presented by Frederator Studios.
Tom and Jerry is an American animated media franchise and series of comedy short films created in 1940 by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. Best known for its 161 theatrical short films by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the series centers on the rivalry between the titular characters of a cat named Tom and a mouse named Jerry. Many shorts also feature several recurring characters.
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The Tune is a 1992 independent animated musical-comedy film directed by Bill Plympton.
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Doogtoons is a production studio founded and headed by Doug Bresler, best known for its series of "animated celebrity interviews" on the internet. Bresler has been producing short films since 1993, but his cartoons only became widely known after they were released as podcasts beginning October 22, 2005. One of the pioneers of cartoon podcasting, Doogtoons has been featured in several publications, both online and in print, including The Washington Post, BusinessWeek Magazine, Animation Magazine, USA Today, Rolling Stone, and Entertainment Weekly, among others. Doogtoons's cartoons and shorts have also been featured and licensed by numerous television networks, including Cinemax, Fox Sports, Game Show Network, G4TV and G4 Canada.
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Your Face is a 1987 animated short film by Bill Plympton. It involves a man seated in a chair crooning about the face of his lover, and as he sings, his own face starts to distort in various ways. His song ends abruptly when a mouth opens in the floor and swallows him and the chair whole; after the closing credits, the mouth reappears and licks its lips.
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Guard Dog is a 2004 5-minute animated dark comedy short film that was hand-drawn and produced by independent animator Bill Plympton at his Plymptoons Studio. In 2005, the film was nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 77th Academy Awards held in 2005 and produced by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Also, in 2005, Guard Dog won Best Animated Short at Toronto World of Comedy International Film Festival, and won a Special Jury Mention for Animated Stories at ANIMA - Córdoba Intl. Animation Festival. This film marked the second Oscar nomination for Plympton, his first being the animated short Your Face at the 60th Academy Awards.
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Born April 30, 1946, in a Portland, Ore., hospital, Plympton grew up in a family of six kids on a farm in nearby Oregon City. ... [Plympton's son] Lucas [was] born about three weeks before this interview was conducted on Oct. 13, 2012....