PROBE

Bill Plympton

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Interview by Alyce Wilson

Well, I guess most adults, if they're bringing a child to your films, they already know a little bit about you.

Yes. But you know, the real problem I have is convincing a lot of the buyers, the TV buyers or whatever that there is a market for animation that's for adults. Look at the Japanese animation. They've carved a whole genre out of adult animation. And they've made it work, and they've made a lot of money on it. So I think that it's starting to change in America. I think Blockbuster now does have a shelf for mature animation. And I think that slowly, America is catching up to Europe in to the fact that cartoons can be enjoyed by adults.

Where do you see similarities and differences between Japanese and American animation?

Well, not counting Miyazaki, who is my hero, but a lot of the Japanese animation is superhero oriented. Lots of over-muscularized characters. And my stuff is humor oriented. I like to tell jokes. I consider myself like the Marx Brothers, if they had done animation. And so I really want to make people laugh. And the Japanese films, you don't see much humor there, except for Miyazaki. But that's the big difference, I think.

They do have more of an openness towards animation, that perhaps American audiences are just beginning to have, as being something that can approach more than just a children's level. Why do you think there is such bias about animation being for kids?

Well, it's obviously Disney. He really pioneered the whole concept of animation as feature films. They pioneered the concept of animation on television. And Disney, as you know, was really a child at heart. And he wanted to do films for children, and he had no real ambition to do it for adults. So he was so successful and so powerful that he created the whole image of animation as only for children.

But The Simpsons is one of the shows that's starting to break that stereotype. Also, MTV helped break the stereotype. And Roger Rabbit helped break it. So there's slow change in the mindset of America.

Well, it's interesting when you mentioned The Simpsons, because Simpsons creator Matt Groening, he started, similarly to you, with doing other kinds of drawing: drawing for newspapers, books, et cetera. When you were doing that, the editorial cartoons and illustrations, when that was your primary work, did you view that as simply a way pay the bills until you found a way to do animation? Or is that a separate interest?

It was always temporary. I always felt that I should be an animator. But when I got out of art school, which was in the early '70s, animation was really dead. So I kind of felt bad that I couldn't become an animator, even though I wanted to. So doing the cartoons and the characters and the illustrations was a stopgap. Sort of a way to make money uuntil my animation was able to take off.

And you had kind of a serendipitous introduction into that, when you were contacted by somebody who wanted to do an animated version of the Jules Feiffer song, Boomtown? How was that experience for you?

Well, that was wonderful, because that's how I learned how to make an animated film. That was my big problem, was I didn't know the technology involved in making the film. And once I worked on Boomtown, where this woman, Connie D'Antuono was the person that really introduced me to the technology of animation. And even though I don't think Boomtown was my favorite film, it was like film school, going to animation school. That's what got me started in my whole new career.

You did attend film school, did you not?

For two semesters.

OK. Was that experience primarily in live action, then?

That was animation. But I didn't really learn much. This is the late '60s and early '70s and the era of the hippies. And the teachers would come in and say, "Oh, today let's do a film about green," you know?

It was, like, "OK. But what do I do?"

And then they would leave. And there was just no real practical instruction.

Now you provide some really good tips for aspiring animators. That was one of the things on your site. And I was wondering if you've ever considered, or if you ever have already done workshops for young animators?

I've done it all over America and all over the world. And it's really successful. I charge a substantial amount of money, so a lot of people can't finance something like that. But I do enjoy doing workshops. I call them master classes. And they're animation master classes. They usually run for six to eight hours. I talk about my career, show my films, show the tricks of the trade, how I survive as an independent, how I come up with ideas. You know, the whole process.

What sort of a studio do you have? Do you have your own facilities?

I have a little studio here in Chelsea in New York. And I have a bunch of tables and computers and some drawing boards and film stuff. I don't have a camera here, and I don't have an editing suite. It's just basically film production.

I guess that when you get to that point, you rent facilities out? When you need an edit bay?

Yes, I rent an editor, a sound editor or a picture editor and just use them for three weeks or whatever it takes.

Now, you bring up computers. I'm wondering, in this age of digital effects, what do you see as the advantage of animation? Obviously, it's what you do. But when we're speaking of film in general, so you think animation frees people up to explore ideas and more unusual story lines?

Well, the magic of animation to me is that there's no real limits to what you can show on the screen. If you want to have someone's eyeballs grow to the size of a moon, you can do it with animation. With live actors, it's a little more problematic. And so it's just that pure connection to one's imagination. It really is what I think is so cool about animation.

Also, I love the idea that you can do a film, an animated film, and it actually looks like a piece of art. It looks like a Renoir painting or a Michelangelo sketch or something like that. And that is really wonderful to see paintings move. And again, that's something you can't do in live action.

photos and images used by permission of Bill Plympton from Plymptoons.com