LIVE FROM MEMPHIS

To me, Bill Plympton will always be that guy who made cool cartoon bumpers for MTV. Those little bits of pastel insanity were the first inkling this blogger got that animation could be more than kid's entertainment, even if Plympton's humor had a juvenile streak. Later, on MTV's groundbreaking, pre-Adult Swim Liquid Television, Plympton joined fellow travelers Peter Chung, creator of Aeon Flux; Mike Judge, of Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill fame at the forefront of the post-Simpsons new animation movement. Plympton's gift for observational humor and love of the visual non-sequitur has put him in the pop-Surrealist pantheon between the baroque intricacies of classic Chuck Jones and the hyper-minimalist shocker Don Hertzfeldt. But his new feature, Idiots and Angels, which was presented Monday night by Indie Memphis, makes a case for Plympton as one of, if not the, greatest living American animator. 

The film is essentially silent; the voice actors never articulate full words, only suggestive sound, leaving the emphasis solely on Plympton's deceptively simple drawings. The plot, which is also deceptively simple, concerns the reluctant transformation of a character called Angel from a self-centered, cruel jerk into a fully realized, compassionate human being. This transformation is literal: the barfly protagonist awakes one morning to find that he has wings growing from his shoulder blades. His attempts to remove them fail, and the wings, which grow steadily larger, take the lead in changing his behavior by forcing him to do good—even when he would just as soon use them to moon passing airliners. As he slowly accepts the transformation, those around him, such as his bartender and doctor, are corrupted by their desire to use his transformation for their own purposes. The film's most telling passage occurs when the antagonists seemingly succeed in kililng Angel and transplanting his white wings onto the bartender, who paints them black and uses chains and torture to make them do his bidding.

That a hand-drawn, 90-minute cartoon can carry off such lofty themes is a testament to Plympton's particular genius in marrying motion and sound, as well as his faith in the ability of comedy to speak so profoundly about the human condition. It was clear from the self-depreciating Q&A that followed the screening that, like any true artist, Plympton follows the work where it leads him and leaves it to others to hash out the deeper meanings. Even though the subject of Idiots and Angels is nothing less than an examination of the nature of good and evil, the animator is still, at his core, the same guy who churned out fun visual gags for those MTV bumpers. Good, in Plympton's worldview, is the natural state of humanity, and grows from inside us like the wings grow from his protagonist. Evil is brought about by selfishness and desire, and must be nourished and maintained with a steady diet of greed and pain. Evil takes forethought and work; becoming a good person is simply a matter of listening to that voice inside ourselves and accepting our own better natures. In retrospect, the film's name gives the game away: the opposite of "angels" is not "devils" or "demons"—it's "idiots".