Your Face

The beauty of "Your Face" is in the way Plympton got a very simple idea--How many ways can you morph a face?--and then elegantly and effectively hand-illustrated the frames to bring that creative idea to rampaging life on the screen.

It took the short animation scene (via the old Tournee) by storm; an immediate fave of one and all!

One of the wonders of it, as the piece proceeds, is seeing Plympton's knack for imagining and capturing the "dynamics"--a surprisingly close approximation of the behaviors of the physical system he's "modeling".

And it all couldn't have happened to a nicer guy: Met Plympton in Angouleme in 2000, and he was a pleasure to chat with about his latest (at the time) project.

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.

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 as much an animation to listen to as watch as this gent finds his face stretched, spun, shrunk, shredded and generally manipulated. He serenades us with a song about his visage - one that looks like it might be suffering from a bit of gout, and about that of his beloved with some fun rhymes to accompany these colourful contortions. From what I could tell, there's not really any story as such here, it's more a collection of enjoyably zany and abstract cartoons from an imaginative Bill Plympton loosely connected by a neck and an only occasionally connected torso. Visually, it's a bit like one of those kaleidoscope toys you had as a kid where shapes change randomly but still with some symmetry and order to them. It's an enjoyable few minutes of skilful drawing.

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."