Idiots and Angels

Idiots and Angels is a film by long time animator and Oscar nominee Bill Plympton. The film is completely without dialogue, relying on characters actions and fantasies to tell the story. It opens with our anti-hero 'Angel' waking up, shaving, showering and having his breakfast. He drives through the bustling traffic and blows up a car that takes his parking space, then heads to a seedy bar. The bar is populated by the surly landlord, his beautiful, neglected wife and a rather rotund woman sitting in the corner. Angel orders a drink and puffs away on his cigarettes until a cocoon in his hair suddenly gives birth to a butterfly. In their own way each character expresses how they feel - The landlord wants to capture the butterfly and use it to generate business, the fat lady wants to have the natural beauty of the thing and be worshiped by men, the wife would like to soar above the heavens on it's back. Angel? He wants to smash it. Angel is a bad man and his routine is simple: drink, sell guns and smoke cigarettes.

One morning he wakes up to discover two small bones sticking out of his back which he manages to cut off with his razor, but the bones are persistent and have soon grown into fully functioning wings. Visiting a back doctor with ideas of his own and delusions of fame, Angel flees and finds himself literally being forced by the wings to do good and to change his ways. While his 'friends' initially humiliate him for his new abnormality, they soon grow envious and decide they want some for themselves.

Idiots and Angels is a beautiful animation with striking imagery and a unique ability to change it's tone and message in a heartbeat. What starts off as a comment on banality turns into a noir-ish thriller then transforms into a morality tale before surging head on into romance. It's also a superhero film. And a comedy. Just as the animation morphs with wildly inventive transitions so does the story and pace. Plymton has an excellent eye for imaginative and outrageous imagery and often one is uncertain if what we are seeing is really happening or just in the characters mind, for instance one scene has Angel riding the landlord's wife around the bar like a horse while Tom Wait's sings in the background. The soundtrack as well as the visuals has a lot to do, essentially making up one half of the experience and it just shines with some great choices of both classical and contemporary pieces.

Basically I think everyone should see this film. It's a serious accomplishment and I think that Plympton should win his first long deserved Oscar for it. I first became aware of his work when I tuned into late night television aged fifteen and had my mind blown by 'I Married a Strange Person!', his surreal 1997 feature. With Idiots and Angels he has kept the same humour and outrageousness and built on the style to add a heavy emotional air that made me begin to really care about the characters and their fate.

Bill Plympton is a workhorse. Most of his animations are produced virtually alone... hunched over his drawing board for years at a time. And yet he loves doing it... and that enthusiasm comes across in his work. There's a lot of life to his best animations, which retain the scratchy lines of the coloured pencils he uses to fill them in. Plympton started as a caricaturist and the characters he draws have that exaggerated quality to them. He's also endearingly filthy. There's some very funny cartoons on 'Bill's Dirty Shorts'... one of which is a date told from the inside of a woman's mouth. And, no, it's not a sausage that she's eating at the end of the animation.

Plympton's last movie 'Hair High' was very disappointing. It had occasional elements of his sleazy sense of humour (including a chicken with a rampant erection), but focused more on a 50s' love story. Another problem was that the animation was much more cell based. The scratchy pencil lines were largely gone, replaced by flatter paints. This is the problem with so many animations. For all of people's gushing over Pixar's stuff they have - amongst a bunch of problems - very little artistry to the animation. There's something dead about CGI animation. Going back to Tex Avery and Chuck Jones, to Will Eisner and comic books, so much of the power of cartoons is the way they exaggerate reality. The distorted faces, the "pops" as characters contort to get the emotion across. It's not that far removed from expressionist art. The image portrays the emotion of the character and the animator. Plympton's pencil style gives his animation a grubby and lively feel, a full representation of what he's into.

Thankfully 'Idiots and Angels' returns to the pencil drawn style, and with it comes a lot of energy. There's also moments of his trademark sleaze... from the initial joke about the lead guy having (what we think is) a hard-on. The same guy also has sexual fantasies over the cleaner at his local bar, wrapping his body around her and licking as he goes.

But 'Idiots and Angels' is much more of - well - an art movie. 'I Married A Strange Person' is pure filth... and hilarious for it. But 'Idiots and Angels' is a full-blown story. A guy - previously an evil gun-runner and hit-man - grows wings. He tries to tie them down, but they always break free. He tries to saw them off, but they grow back. And as they grow, they start controlling him. Knocking his hand away as he reaches for a tit. Getting him to return money from a robbery. Forcing him to rescue people. Eventually, they help him fall in love with the cleaner. And through all that, there's just enough sleaze and violence to ensure the sappy side of the movie doesn't become cloying.

'Idiots and Angels' creeps up on you. I was pretty convinced in the first 20 minutes that it wasn't going to be good. It's initially slow, and there are very few gags to ease the pacing. But, as with all of Plympton's "real" work, the beauty of the pictures draws you along and - in this case - results in a fascinating story. No character in the movie talks (aside from the odd incoherent grumble) and 'Idiots and Angels' plays like a clever, silent movie. There's some lovely transitions from image to image using animation. The water from a shower morphs into a running tap then milk pouring... all to quickly get across the idea of the morning routine. There is music - including a couple of great old tracks from Tom Waits - and it all gives the movie a dreamlike feel. And that feel makes complete sense with the way the story progresses.

I did prefer 'I Married A Strange Person' because it's immense fun. But, if you're in the right contemplative mood, 'Idiots and Angels' has a hell of a lot going for it. And, of course, it's just nice to see a little art return to animation.

"Bill Plympton amazes and amuses yet again in his latest feature animation. I kept thinking, while watching the movie unfold, that I was seeing things I'd never seen before...a marvelous mixture of black humor, otherworldly wonder, and pathos.

On one level it's a nonstop stream of sight gags which are ingenious and hilarious. But much more than that, they build and build to create a river of escalating tension and action that gushes into a sea of astonishment, ending with an interesting twist, setting up new ideas to imagine after the movie ends.

Bill Plympton's work is utterly one-of-a-kind, so I would advise anyone who likes exploring strange new worlds to run and see this one."

If you're new to Plympton world you may be not at home with the language, but I'm sure you'll fall into it throughout the first 20 minutes or so. The fact is I left the cinema with a lot of words in my mind only to learn soon after that the movie is in fact wordless. It didn't feel like that at all. The images are so expressive that the story is perfectly conveyed by their sharp meaning... Illusory as ever Plympton delves ever more deeper and clearer through the imaginary of the human psyche. This is humanity in a nutshell if you will. Plympton takes its pulse on the world along with some great music that further compliments the drawings' edge... Plympton has matured to become a refined groundbreaking animator that will mark cinematic animation for years to come.

The story was weird, grotesque and pretentious. I didn't like or care about any of the characters and the pacing was glacial for a film barely an hour long.

The animation was... artistic, but not beautiful or entertaining.

There is no dialogue, just a song somewhere randomly placed in the film.

I guess people who like this kind of movie like it for reasons that I will never be able to understand. I see how much effort has been put in the film and I appreciate it, but I cannot like it, so I will give it a "decent" and move on.

Showing the banal hideousness of humans doesn't make one appear smart, BTW, just depressed.