Bill Plympton on Slide: His Most Personal Film

Bill Plympton on Slide: a film built from his own childhood

Bill Plympton has spent decades making animation that looks like nobody else's. He is a cartoonist and animator whose career includes Your Face, the short film that earned an Oscar nomination, and a run of couch gags for The Simpsons. With Slide, an animated feature he wrote, animated, directed and designed, he says he has made something closer to home than any of it.

The biography matches the claim. Plympton was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1946 and grew up on a farm outside Oregon City, one of six children. He studied cartooning at the School of Visual Arts in New York and graduated in 1969. Your Face was nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 1988 Academy Awards. Since then he has built a feature filmography that includes The Tune (1992), Mutant Aliens (2001), Hair High (2004), Idiots and Angels (2008), Cheatin' (2013) and Revengeance (2016). Anyone looking up Bill Plympton for the first time will find that Slide is the latest entry in a long line of hand-drawn films.

He was talking at his Artist Alley table at New York Comic Con when he explained why. “The character, the action, all takes place in my hometown, in Oregon,” he said. “And the music is my kind of music. And the humor is my kind of humor.” His case for the film is simple: it is the first time every ingredient came from his own taste.

He also had a reason for believing audiences would respond. People need comedy, he argued, and the world was in perilous times. That is a modest pitch for a film full of outlaws and guitars, and it is typical of a filmmaker who is more interested in making people laugh than in explaining himself.

Logging trucks, Hank Williams and a rustic Oregon

The look and feel of Slide come from growing up in the country. Plympton remembers logging trucks passing his family's house with a great rumble, and he wanted the film to recall that era of his youth. His father, a banker, listened to country music constantly, with Hank Williams, Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash on heavy rotation. That music went into the movie. What he wanted was a rustic Oregon way of life on screen.

The result is a western with the soul of a childhood memory. The soundtrack takes its cues from country-western records of Williams and Cline, and the setting is a logging town whose trade has left its mark on the landscape.

A hero called Slide, and 200 bad guys

The title character is a musician named Slide, a mysterious, Clint Eastwood-type figure who plays slide guitar. Plympton plays slide guitar himself. But he is clear that the hero is not the draw for him. In his view the bad guys are the best part of any film, and this one has more of them than any film he has made. He puts the number at about 200 evil, dirty, scroungy men.

The setting is a bar and gambling club that doubles as a bordello, which gives the film its share of sex comedy. Plympton says it is decidedly not for children. In his words it is not a kids' film, not a Pixar film and not Disney. He compares it to what Mel Brooks would have made if Brooks had been a cartoonist.

The Brooks comparison is a useful guide to tone. Brooks built comedies by taking a genre seriously enough to wreck it, and a western stocked with 200 grimy villains and a guitar-wielding drifter is an obvious target. Viewers who like Blazing Saddles-style parody, but want it drawn by hand with colored pencil, are the audience Plympton is describing.

A pacifist western with an environmental streak

Under the jokes there is a message. Plympton calls the film environmental, with talk of saving the country, the beautiful forests and the way the lumber industry levels the ground. Slide arrives in a strange, sort of tragic town and uses his guitar to defeat gunmen and dynamite-throwers alike. Plympton calls the result a pacifist film, even with all the villains in it.

Slide by the numbers

These figures come from what Plympton said at New York Comic Con in 2023 and from festival listings.

• Length. About 80 minutes.
• Drawings. Roughly 30,000, all by Plympton, backgrounds and characters.
• Villains. About 200.
• Materials. Ballpoint pen and ink, colored with colored pencil, scanned and composited.
• Setting. A logging region of Oregon, in a gambling club that is also a bordello.
• Music. Country and western in the vein of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline.

How Plympton made Slide, and where it screened

The method is traditional to the point of stubbornness. Plympton draws in ballpoint pen and ink, colors the frames with colored pencil, and then the pieces are scanned and composited into the film. The 80-minute feature needed tens of thousands of drawings, and he did every one himself, backgrounds and characters alike. He put the total at about 30,000.

People did not believe him. They told him it was impossible and assumed he must have hired someone to do the in-betweens. He said he did not have the money to hire in-betweeners and simply likes doing all the drawings himself. It is the kind of answer that explains an entire career.

A film with this many hand-drawn frames takes years, and the schedule showed it. The Kickstarter campaign for Slide launched in 2020, the pandemic then pushed the work aside for commercial jobs, and by the fall of 2023 the finish line was a matter of weeks. That timeline explains why the NYCC conversation sounded so relaxed about delays: for a one-man production, delays are part of the method.

The voice work is the one place he held back. He did very minimal voice parts, he said with a smile, “we'll say the screams,” and then demonstrated one on the spot.

The production was not smooth. Covid delayed the film by two years: Plympton could not teach, set the project aside and took commercial work instead. When he spoke at NYCC he expected Slide to be complete by the end of November, and he said it would play film festivals, including International Film Festival Rotterdam. Shortened cuts had already screened at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival and Market in France and at the Woodstock Film Festival, to a positive reception. He stressed that those were works in progress, not finished films, and that all the pieces were coming together.

Bill Plympton's Slide after New York Comic Con: festival run

The festival record since that conversation fits what he described. Slide competed in the Contrechamp section at Annecy in June 2023, in a cut that was about 90 percent finished. Its complete version premiered in the Canary Islands in September 2023 at the Animayo festival, with screenings on September 19 and 21 in Las Palmas and Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The Los Angeles premiere followed on December 9, 2023, at the Los Angeles Animation Festival.

Slide was also a selection for the Slamdance Film Festival in 2024, in its Breakouts section, and Luxembourg's Utopia festival listed an 80-minute version with a public screening on March 6, 2024. The project was financed in part through Kickstarter. Those listings confirm the length he gave at NYCC. A Rotterdam screening, which he mentioned as planned, did not turn up in the festival records reviewed for this piece.

For readers new to his work, the practical advice is to start with the shorts and the earlier features, then come to Slide as the one that gathers everything he likes in one place. For readers who know him, it is a rare case of an animator telling the audience exactly what he put in the film, and then delivering it.

The sequence of events, from a convention table to festival screenings in France, Spain, the United States and Luxembourg, shows a film coming together in public. Plympton said at the time that all the pieces were coming together. The festival record suggests he was right. For anyone curious about the Bill Plympton approach to animation, Slide is the clearest demonstration so far of how far one pen can go.

A last detail from the Artist Alley table: Plympton pointed readers to his own website, plymptoons.com, for more on Slide and for his other work. For a filmmaker who sells his art in person at conventions, that is a fitting place to send an audience.

Sources

• Bill Plympton, Wikipedia — filmography and career, including Slide