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.

While this isn't one of Bill Plympton's best cartoons (it's way too "normal" compared to many of his shorts), it is amazing to watch--especially when you notice that this is all done with what appear to be colored pencils--a rather labor-intensive process. I really liked his insurance ads from a decade ago more--they were very violent yet charming--but still, this is pretty good stuff. Plus, after seeing the PLYMPTOONS DVD, I realize that it's the first film he made that is the classic Plympton style.

The concept is simple: a guy's face and upper body are all you see and rather annoying operatic-style music plays as his face begins to do mega-strange things. His lips pop off and move about, his face repeatedly turns inside out, etc. Also, oddly enough, I thought the guy looked a lot like President Lyndon Johnson.

Very captivating and deceptively simple. You just can't stop watching the weirdness once it begins despite there really being no plot.

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.

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!

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.