Drawn to This Line of Work

If Bill Plympton likes to draw every frame of every animated film he produces, does that make him the Luddite of the cartoon world?

Certainly the 25,000 personalized illustrations in “Mutant Aliens,” Plympton’s latest feature project, serve as an interesting contrast to the three-dimensional, computer-generated images in studio blockbusters like “Shrek” and “Toy Story.” And that’s just fine with Bill Plympton.

“I really like the look of the pencil line. It’s real fantasy,” says the writer, producer, director and entrepreneur, whose film opens Friday in Los Angeles. “I just love to draw. There’s nothing better than for me to get up at 7 o’clock in the morning and draw all day.”

An Oregon native who has lived in New York for upward of 30 years, Plympton is more than just a speed-drawing whiz who can knock off 200 renderings a day. He finances his own films; he’s done five, including two animated features, “The Tune” (1992) and “I Married a Strange Person” (1998), and has occasionally self-distributed them. He makes cartoons with R-rated material in a medium generally thought of as kiddie-centric.

And he is a self-taught entrepreneur who has learned how to increase his bottom line by selling everything from Plympton-inspired T-shirts to books and CDs.

Plympton “definitely is an anomaly” in the animation world, says Rita Street, online editor of Animation magazine. “He succeeds because he sticks to his vision, and he does it all by himself.”

It’s a style that’s not for all tastes. Bawdy and bloody, surreal and free-form, Plympton’s work seems, at first glance, to be aimed solely at pizza-eating frat boys. He loves off-color jokes, big-busted women and animated riffs that appear to come out of nowhere. As Plympton puts it, his output is “a blend of Magritte and R. Crumb--that European surrealism, but the weird, goofy sexual craziness of R. Crumb.”

Plympton is not the only cartoonist working in this realm. Thanks to “The Simpsons,” “South Park,” Japanese anime and MTV, animation for adults is no longer limited to the occasional “Fritz the Cat” feature or a 1930s cartoon porno loop. But Plympton stands out because of his cult following, the sheer goofiness of some of his films, and his occasionally maddening indifference to pacing and plot.

In “Mutant Aliens,” for example, a stranded astronaut discovers that a group of lab animals sent into outer space is still alive. The astronaut breeds their offspring and then returns with them to Earth, where they wreak revenge against the scientists who abandoned them. This weird tale is told with the usual Plympton flourishes: plenty of explosions, cartoony sex jokes, striking color schemes and an off-the-wall sense of humor.

Viewing a Plympton cartoon is like watching illustrations that move. Fully animated films such as “The Lion King” use 24 drawings per second to create a sense of fluid action, but Plympton’s budgetary and time constraints force him to use only six. This tends to slow down the pacing of his work, but it is compensated for by visual stylization and zaniness. The films can, however, be quite off-putting--especially if you’ve been weaned on the lush look of Disney.

Despite all this, or maybe because of it, both “Mutant Aliens” and Plympton’s previous film, “I Married a Strange Person,” have been awarded the grand prize for feature films at the Annecy (France) Film Festival, the Cannes of the animation world.

Plympton says he is sometimes accused of being misogynistic or obsessed with violence, but in reality he is simply filming “what makes me laugh. I think if [the 1940s screwball animator] Tex Avery were alive today, he would do these really offensive, outlandish, pushing-the-edge cartoons. In a sense, I’m sort of his son, but I’m pushing the limits of good taste, and I think that’s important, because animation needs to break out of its stereotype.”

“He’s an auteur, that’s his vision, that’s what he likes,” adds Heather Kenyon of the Animation World Network Web site, awn.com. “Everybody has their fans and those who are less than enthused about their work. OK, you don’t like the violence, the girls with the big boobs; that’s his vision.”

Plympton’s vision comes out of an unlikely place--a cosmically cluttered loft in the Chelsea section of New York, which doubles as his living quarters and studio. Scattered around the space are shelves filled with videocassettes, props and books, a drawing table and a copying machine used for transferring his drawings to acetate cels. There is also a video camera, which Plympton uses to test his work, and a worktable on which his assistants color the cels. All the drawings and cels from his films, about 100,000 in all, are stacked in boxes around the room.

The driving force behind this mess is a tall, slim, soft-spoken man who looks younger than his 55 years. Born and raised in Portland, Plympton was influenced by Daffy Duck and Mickey Mouse at an early age and always wanted to be an animator. He majored in graphic design at Portland State University, then moved to New York, where he studied animation for a short time at the School of Visual Arts.

Plympton began his career as an illustrator and political cartoonist, working for publications as diverse as Vogue, the Village Voice and Penthouse. His big break as an animator came in 1983, when a female friend suggested that he animate “Boomtown,” a song by cartoonist Jules Feiffer. The seven-minute film, a musical parable of the Cold War, wound up playing at several film festivals. Its minor success led Plympton to put up $2,000 of his own money to make another short called “Your Face,” about a sleazy crooner whose face changes in surreal ways as he sings a cornball love song. That film won more than a dozen awards, was Oscar-nominated and sold to MTV.

“I realized [after that],” says Plympton, “I had been wasting my life doing these illustrations when I could be making animation and making a lot of money and getting famous around the world.”

Plympton was savvy. Unlike the many independent animators who know little or nothing about the business end of their field, Plympton realized early on that he could make a lot more money if he financed his own projects, held on to the rights and became involved in ancillary markets like merchandising. He learned how to negotiate contracts and even distributed some films on his own, going from theater to theater with his prints, making a live presentation before the show and selling T-shirts and other tchotchkes afterward.

The key to Plympton’s financial success is that he can make enough money on his short films to finance his features. His market includes foreign and domestic TV, video and theatrical sales, and the occasional educational deal--his 1989 humorous short “25 Ways to Quit Smoking” has been sold to scores of schools, which use it as an anti-smoking message film.

Plympton has also learned the art of pre-sales. “Mutant Aliens,” which cost about $200,000 to produce (it’s being distributed by L.A.-based Apollo Cinema), has already made its money back thanks to theatrical, TV and video sales in France, Germany, Korea and other countries. Of course, it’s all chump change compared with feature-length studio animation. At most, Plympton can expect to see his films in 200 theaters nationwide, usually art houses and college campus venues. His biggest payday came from “I Married a Strange Person,” which cost $250,000 to produce and grossed $500,000.

But limited success is still success. Now Plympton is planning his next big step. He wants to set up a mini-studio with full-time animation and office help, which will allow him the leisure to sit at his desk and do what he does best: draw. Plympton is searching for another loft space to move his business into, overseeing the production of trailers and posters for “Mutant Aliens” and doing preliminary sketches for his next feature, “Hair High.” “It’s an animated ‘Carrie,’ ” says Plympton, “a Gothic-high-school, urban-myth kind of thing.”

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“Mutant Aliens” opens Friday exclusively at Laemmle’s Fairfax Cinemas, 7907 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 655-4010; and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500. The film is not rated.