Your Face

Bill Plympton's Academy Award-nominated "Your Face" goes the Bob Clampett route, with a man's face changing in all sorts of ways while he sings. This short shows the heights that animation can reach when one puts one's imagination to it. It was certainly a neat one. Available on YouTube.

This is really simple to describe. We have a central figure whose face changes over a hundred times. The faces are creative as well as photographic. The have been done with drawings and then integrated. Quite remarkable. Apparently the song we here has some significance.

This short, nominated for an Academy Award, is visually exceptional and conceptually wonderful. From what I've seen of his work, it's also one of the most conventionally "normal" pieces he's done! It's a kick to watch. Plympton is an acquired taste and I seem to have done so. If you like good animation that messes with the boundaries and sometimes colors outside the lines, try Plympton. By all means, catch this one! Most recommended.

As odd as this may sound, I first saw "Your Face" on the Lifetime Channel as I was laying in a hospital room, recovering from major surgery. "Your Face" seemed to fit then and it seems to fit now and always.

Although Plympton had made several cartoons prior to "Your Face," this is the fist time we see the style his work is noted for: impossibly grotesque body deformations done for laughs, and funny, too. We watch and see everything that could possibly happen to the singer's head, including abstract reduction. All through the strange looking singer seems blissfully unaware of what's being done to him as he sings a song that is a perfect parody of the ballad and touching, as well.

As with later films, Plympton does little if anything to signal us if we should laugh, be horrified, or just creeped out. This sense of subtlety is what makes his films so enjoyable to me.

Although only three minutes long, this is a perfectly complete, self-contained masterpiece of animation.

Bill Plympton rules!

There is no story in this animated short: just wild and crazy contortions drawn on a face who is singing a song about "your face." As he sings, almost every conceivable oddity occurs, such as facial parts changing position, head being twisted, cut, pulled inside-out, being chopped into pieces and reforming and so many things you can't describe.

This really is a three-minute piece showing the imagination of the artist. It kept me riveted to my seat, wondering what crazy thing will I see in the next few seconds. Basic, but fascinating material. It was up for an Academy Award.

You can see it on the DVD called "Plympton: The Complete Early Works Of Bill Plympton."