SLIFF Interview: BILL PLYMPTON

This interview was conducted by Jim Batts on November 11th, 2011.

Bill Plympton is one of the most creative and prolific artists to emerge out of the independent animation shorts film arena of the late 1980’s. His short YOUR FACE was nominated for an Academy Award and follow-up shorts like HOW TO KISS and  HOW TO QUIT SMOKING became the highlights of several traveling animation compilations and festivals. He soon branched out into feature films with THE TUNE and set up a New York animation studio to produce commercials and music videos along with more features and shorts. Recently Plympton has helmed several live action features. He’s here in St. Louis to accept the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 20th Annual Stella Artois St. Louis International Film Festival. Mr. Plympton was kind enough to take time out of his busy schedule to speak with me by phone.

WAMG: My name is Jim Batts with WeAreMovieGeeks.com [and] I want to welcome you to St. Louis. Great to have you here for the big film festival. I guess we can make you an honorary film geek since I saw your documentary and you mention you saw, or still do see two or three movies a day. Is that still the case?

Bill Plympton: Yeah, I do. (laughter) I’m crazy.

WAMG: Oh, that’s amazing! That’s amazing! In the documentary, which I really enjoyed, ADVENTURES IN PLYMPTOONS…

BP: Thank you!

WAMG: …you mention about getting a lot of inspiration, or I guess getting your start watching, Saturday morning cartoons. I was wondering if there was a particular animator or studio that you kind of drifted towards back then?

BP: Well certainly Warner Brothers.. the Bugs Bunny and Daffy Ducks were very,very amusing and made me laugh and that’s when I decided that laughter is the magic potient to make everybody feel good, feel healthy, love their life, and that’s what I want to do. I wanted to make people laugh.

WAMG: Oh, yeah.

BP: My Dad was actually,although he was a banker, he was a very lively guy, and he was always the center of attention at parties. Because he could make everybody laugh. And I just thought, ” Wow, you know I’m not very good at telling  jokes verbally, but I can make people laugh with my drawings. So I’m trying to emulate my Dad with my cartoons.

WAMG: Yeah, I enjoyed the stories in the film about getting into trouble with some of your drawings in school. Brought back some memories myself there.

BP: That’s true. That’s true.

WAMG: Definitely.  Did you or were you aware of some of the people behind the cartoons when you were growing up?

BP: Later actually I started looking at the directors. Not when I was really young, of course I didn’t really care. But I later I found out that Tex Avery or Bob Clampett were the geniuses behind the cartoons that I found so funny.

WAMG: Did you ever check out  or have any interest in the early Fleischer Studios stuff?

BP:  Oh, certainly. I loved the Popeyes and the Betty Boops and the Supermans were really entertaining, but I don’t know, I think for my mind the Tex Avery stuff was just a whole other level. It was very smart humor, it wasnt just stupid, punch you in the face humor. And of course the style was much more sophisticated and much better drawn than the Fleischer Brothers stuff. So that’s why I was attracted to the Warner Brothers. Then, of course, Disney was a huge influence. I mean everybody who’s an animator today grew up on Disney. The feature films, you know Song of the South, Sleeping Beauty, Dumbo. Dumbo particularly is one of my favorites. It’s a classic, classic film.

WAMG: I’m still hoping that one day we’ll see Song of the South available at our local video store.

BP: Tough to find anymore.

WAMG: Speaking of influences, since you are a print cartoonist I’m wondering if there were any particular comic strips or comic books that influence you back then, that you started to read and pick up on?

BP: Well certainly Peanuts, I love Peanuts. I love Al Capp.  Li’l Abner. Although the comics weren’t that big a deal for me. I thought they were amusing. For me it really blossomed when I saw R Crumb’s underground comics. And the others… Spain and Rodriguez, those other guys’ underground comics really opened up my eyes as to what comics could be and I was in college when I discovered Zap Comics. But also Charles Addams, the guy who did the Addams Family, was very influential because he was doing really dark, sick cartoons about death and murder and pain and suffering that were funny. And that was  kind of a verboten topic back then.

WAMG: Yeah, yeah.

BP:  Mad. I used to look at Mad. Don Martin was my favorite in Mad, certainly. Although I wasn’t a big Mad freak. I did like Mad magazine. I thought it was good.

WAMG: I was wondered if you were about the right age for when Mad first came out as a color comic book. When Harvey Kurtzman was editing it?

BP:  Certainly. Yeah, Harvey was a big hero of mine. And I was fortunate enough to become a friend of his shortly before he died. And he was a very supportive guy, really liked what I did, and supported what I was doing, so it was very nice dealing with him. I never worked for him, but he was kind of a friend actually.

WAMG: You did mention the underground comics, were you offered or perhaps did you send some stuff in to the underground Zap-type comics?

BP: Well, I was  too young then and they were all in San Francisco, so it was all sort of, it didn’t work out . I did however do a lot of comics for men’s magazines, Screw, Playboy, Penthouse, Oui (I did a lot of stuff for Rui, actually) that was my exposure,  outlet for comics.

WAMG: I enjoyed seeing those covers in the documentary. You were able to be very creative with them.

BP: Well, they only paid like ninety bucks or something. They didn’t pay very much, but it was easy money and it was fun to see it all over the city so it worked out.

WAMG: Did you first start to produce animation during your college years or did you start to fool around with the family 8mm camera?

BP: No, I became obsessed with animation in college. And unfortunately there was no animation school or industry in Portland, Oregon when I was in college. It was basically no one to turn to, at least I didn’t know who to turn to.  And so I tried to do it on my own with an 8 mm camera and that was a big failure and I did a 16 mm and that was shot upside-down accidentally, so I just decided it was too much work. And so I went to New York. I moved to New York to become an illustrator, and so my desires to be an animator were basically put on hold until the mid 80’s when animation started coming back and the whole indie-film world started exploding and I felt, well  if these guys could make films outside of the Hollywood circle, then it could do it too. People like Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee were making films. In New York, independent films, so I was inspired by that.

WAMG: Now, getting back to the start of your animation career, did you start with just the pencil drawings, or did you try to go right in to the colored cel work?

BP: I started with pencil drawings. It was the lowest tech, it was the easiest for me. It was very simple to do that.  And it wasn’t until I think I did THE TUNE, which was in 1991 that I gave it a shot, doing cell animation and that was just an experiment with it and then I think I did cel animation just until I did HAIR HIGH, that was the last cell animation film I did. But all the features were done on cel animation. THE TUNE had some, then, of course I MARRIED A STRANGE PERSON, MUTANT ALIENS, and then HAIR HIGH was the last one and it was then that digital technology came in and the price was low enough that I could afford to a digital transfer. That was the thing that held me up was the cost.

WAMG: Watching your shorts like YOUR FACE and HOW TO KISS and those others I could just imagine how many boxes of colored pencils you’d go through.

BP: Not only that, but my apartment is filled with bins up to the ceiling with artwork that is still around from those films. So. it’s all for sale on my website.

WAMG: Really? That’s great! Did you have any mentors starting out in the business. I saw Ralph Bakshi in the documentary, Did you contact him or did he contact you around the time of producing your short films?

BP: No, I should’ve. That was a mistake. I’m a pretty shy guy and even though he was doing FRITZ THE CAT when I had moved to New York, I really wasn’t aware of it. And had no connections with anybody who was in the business and I should’ve been more pushy about that. But mentors? No, I had one woman, Connie D’Antuono, and she was the one who really showed me how to make a film, how to make an animated film, the technology of it. I knew how to draw it. I knew how to write it. I always loved the Preston Blair book that he did called ” Animation “, that was my bible. I guess if there was a mentor, it was him. And he was really the influence on how to make animated films. But once I knew the magic formula, the technology behind it, then I went crazy. I started in 1985 making two or three short films a year. And then a feature every two or three years.

WAMG: Well Bakshi brought his new Mighty Mouse cartoons in 1987 and that was when you were making your short films. I wondered if there was any talk of a collaboration once he was moving back into features with COOL WORLD.

BP: He was in LA and I was in New York, so that would’ve been very difficult and I never really knew him till about ten years ago when we met, I forget where it was, probably the San Diego Comic Con or something like that and he was a big fan and he was a big supporter and in many ways he was jealous that I could make my films without studio interference.

WAMG:  Especially television executive interference, too. (laughs)

BP:  (laughs) Yeah. But his budgets were 100, 200 times mine, so that’s the other side of the coin.  That he had these huge budgets, and he got big-name stars and I’m struggling making these little indie films that barely get distribution, so there’s both sides of the equation that are valid and I actually prefer mine even though I’m not a rich guy, I don’t make a lot of money, but I make the films I want to make. And that’s what I’ll be talking about in my appearances here in St. Louis, how it is possible to be an indie film maker, indie animator, and make a living, make money. And I hope a lot of local artists, or film makers show up to my shows and enjoy the films that I’m gonna’ show. And everybody who comes gets a free Bill Plympton drawing., so I hope they turn out.

WAMG: So besides seeing your great work, you’ll take home a piece of work!

BP: That’s it!  I didn’t think of it that way.

WAMG: Before we finish I wanted to tell you that when I’d see your films in the tournees and festivals, there’s be almost a rumple through the audience and some applause when your films would appear. Did you ever sneak into to these screenings so you could gauge the audience reactions?

BP: Yeah, it’s important. If I’m in town I definitely like to go to them. Not so much anonymously, but  I like to sit in the audience and hear how the audience responds to each individual film cause it’s important to find out what works and what doesn’t work and what the audience likes. And , obviously, with the Spike and Mike show,it’s outrageous, weird humor. That’s what I like to do.

WAMG:  It reminded me of what I’d read about movie theatres in the 30’s and 40’s. When Bugs Bunny would show up, there would be applause and your work would have a similar reaction.

BP: Occasionally I would do that. Sort of anonymously sit in there and listen to what they’d say about myself . I try not to impose myself on them. I try to remain secretive there. But it is fun to hear people’s laughter and that’s what drives me to make my films is hearing people laughing at my films  and that’s the main reason I do it.

WAMG: Well, they’re going to laughing for a long, long time at those films. I want to congratulate on getting the well deserved SLIFF Lifetime Achievement Award . It’s a terrific thing they’re doing. I’ll wish the best of luck this weekend and I look forward to seeing more of your work. The best compliment I can give you is that after seeing the documentary I pulled out my old sketch pad.

BP: Good for you! For more information people can go to plymptoons.com. Good bye!

An Evening with Bill Plympton will be at Webster University’s Moore Auditorium on Friday November 11 at 7 PM.  The next day, Saturday November 12, the same venue will present the documentary ADVENTURES IN PLYMPTOONS at 5 PM. A master class with Mr. Plympton will be held at Webster that same day at 1 PM. All the events are part of the 20th Annual Stella Artois St. Louis International Film Festival.