I fist caught Hair High back at the San Diego Comic Con in 2005 and have to say it's my favorite Plympton feature. If you're in the LA area this weekend (April 13) you have to come out to Laemmle's Sunset 5 to meet Bill and catch this incredible independent animated feature! I hear Guard Dog will be making an appearance too!!
BILL PLYMPTON
Director/Animator, Guide Dog
Via phone from his studio, New York City, 3/23/2007
Taylor Jessen: You told me a few years ago when we first talked about the dog – by the way, does he have a name yet?
Bill Plympton: No, he doesn’t have a name yet. (laughs)
TJ: You said that you thought he might become your new Mickey Mouse, and he did go so far as to become the mascot of the Anima Mundi festival in 2006. So whaddya think – T-shirts? Saturday morning series? Shot glasses?
BP: Well, we’re talking to some people right now for merchandising, but they want to see it on TV every day, and they want to see it at McDonald’s, and all that sort of stuff – which I don’t think I’m ready for. I want to keep the ownership of the film for myself. However there is precedent with Wallace and Gromit, which were basically done as shorts and features, and didn’t really show up on TV, and they merchandised very well. So I probably will follow that lead. And they didn’t really have merchandise until the third short came out. So I’m working right now on my third short with the dog.
TJ: Any details you can reveal?
BP: Yeah – he’s going to join a fire engine company. Obviously he causes a lot of deaths through fire. We’re thinking of calling it Hot Dog. So watch for that next year.
TJ: Did you know as early as the middle of production on the first one that there would be a sequel, or did you not know until it was a hit?
BP: I thought it was just a regular film. I really just figured, “This is another short film.” And then – it was a screening in Baltimore, the Baltimore Film Festival. People went crazy. And I went, “What’s this all about?” And it’s something about the dog that really appeals to people. So I didn’t really expect this kind of clamor for the animal until it was finished and it had its first screening. I was really surprised. I thought there were a lot of problems with it. I thought there were a lot of mistakes I had to fix, but people really took to it.
TJ: Well I think part of that is that you have an audience – and I include myself in that demographic – who’ve been exposed to your work since the mid-eighties with MTV and then with the Tournees, and I stand behind the assertion that some of those shorts of yours have been the best-performing comedy shorts I’ve ever seen. Something like 25 Ways to Quit Smoking is going to be knocking them dead 350 years from now…
BP: I hope so, I hope so.
TJ: So the audience reaction immediately upon seeing that first frame is “Oh cool, here comes the next Plympton short”, and it’s in the same genre as those early shorts that made people laugh ten, twenty years ago.
BP: It’s been very good whenever I’m in these shows. And I would like to give a plug for the Animation Show, because they’re really doing a great job distributing these short films all across America. Their choices of films are excellent. It’s not just funny films, they do art films and abstract films and digital films. So it’s really a nice compendium of the best around the world. I’m so proud to have my film in there, and it’s really great to hear the audience go crazy for my next film, and applaud. That’s the way films should be seen, in a big audience where everybody has sort of a communal laugh, and everybody can laugh together at the film.
TJ: Where have you followed the film so far with the Animation Show?
BP: I was in Boston, I was in Chicago, New York, of course – I think that’s it. I may do one or two more, though.
TJ: How long, in general, do you spend on one short?
BP: Mostly about two months. That’s about it. Guard Dog and Guide Dog, they were written fairly quickly. I write it in about two or three weeks. I draw it in about two or three weeks. And then I test it, and edit it, and do the sound and music. So maybe two months, maybe three months, if I have other projects I’m working on.
TJ: Tell me about how you test it. Because there’s growing awareness, I think, that there’s this nice salon of New York animators and everyone shares their work and gets reactions that way.
BP: Where’d you hear about that?
TJ: There was a blurb in New York Times a few months ago.
BP: How did you find that?
TJ: I think Cartoon Brew linked to it. Signe Baumane was mentioned, and so was PES.
BP: Yeah. That’s funny. I don’t know if it’s unique, because I really don’t travel a lot to other cities where they have animation. But it’s very nice because these are all professionals, and they’re all very good animators, and it’s like a book group, where we all show sections of our films and comment on them and get feedback. And what’s great is, even though they can say “That was really bad” they also say “Well, here’s how you can make it better.” So it’s constructive criticism. It’s not just tearing it down. It’s a lot of ideas flying around. It’s very critical, and they come up with really brilliant ways to make it better.
TJ: It does sound perfect. It’s like a focus group of your peers.
BP: Yeah. And the good thing is, it’s not just a bunch of glad-handers. They really want to make the film better, so they point out what’s wrong with it.
TJ: How does the finished short compare to your first storyboard? Does it stick pretty close?
BP: It’s about 80 percent the same, I think, something like that. Maybe 85 percent.
TJ: What do you do by yourself, and what do you farm out to your crew at the studio?
BP: I write it, I storyboard it, I design the characters, I design the backgrounds. I do the animation, and I do the shadows, the shading. And that’s it. Then I’m done. I hand off the big stack of drawings to my assistants. They scan, they clean – it’s all computer now, we don’t use camera – they composite, they color, they edit. Then I have a sound guy who does all my sound effects, and I have a music person who does all my music. It’s a staff of about eight people.
TJ: That’s your regular full-time staff at West 27th?
BP: Yeah, but the people are not all there. The sound guy and the music person all work at home. So basically it’s only five or six people that work out of my office that put it together.
TJ: Your music videos, especially “Don’t Download This Song”, have been just killing everybody everywhere they go recently. Is that mainly how you’re making payroll these days, through commercial commissions?
BP: No, that’s a very important question. I do like doing commercial work, especially music videos, and occasionally a commercial – although I haven’t done a commercial in ages – but most of the money comes from the short films. The short films are very successful. They’re sold all over Europe. They do well on DVDs. They do well on the internet and iPods. And they do well theatrically. The Animation Show helps pay for it. And you have to understand that my films are very inexpensive to make. They only take, like I say, two months, maybe three months to make the films. And again, the staff is very small. So the key to success is that they’re not expensive. They cost about a thousand dollars per minute. So something like Guard Dog costs five thousand dollars. I can make that money back just with the theatrical release. And then all the other sales, foreign sales, TV sales, DVD sales, internet sales – those all make a profit. And then you have to realize that these films are timeless. Some of the films that I made twenty years ago, like you say, 25 Ways to Quit Smoking, or Your Face, are still making money. So I have a library of films, the features and the shorts, that are still bringing in money. For example, we just made a deal with Spanish television to sell my whole library for a substantial figure. This is the shorts and the features. And every country has television channels that are looking for animation. I sell it to every channel. That’s my income.
TJ: It does help, too, that you’re adhering to the unwritten rule of success in international animation, which is working mostly in mime.
BP: Yeah, that’s true. Although Fan and the Flower does have dialogue, and it’s a very successful film. Most of my films are without dialogue, and they’re just sound effects and music, which I think is best for me, anyway. In fact, this new feature I’m working on, Idiots and Angels, an eighty-minute feature, will have no dialogue at all.
TJ: Wow, you’re going into real Triplets of Belleville territory there.
BP: Yeah. They were very successful with it, and I think I can duplicate it.
TJ: That would be extraordinary. Can you give a quick précis of the feature?
BP: It’s a very David Lynch kind of film. It’s dark, it’s Eastern European, it’s mysterious, it’s enigmatic. There is a little bit of humor, a little bit of sex, nudity, but not as much as in the past. It’s about a guy who’s a ne’er-do-well, he’s a selfish, oafish guy, and one day he wakes up and he’s starting to grow wings on his back. And it’s how he deals with that phenomenon.
TJ: That’s very Kafkaesque.
BP: Yeah, it is. Thank you. I should use that in my quotes.
TJ: How’s your Webshop doing?
BP: Very good. All week long, we’ve been getting a lot of interest on it. It’s something that I like a lot. It’s a great promotional tool for my films.
TJ: Do you do most of your DVD sales through there?
BP: No, we split them up with AWN, of course, and our Website, and Microcinema sells a lot. So it’s different venues.
TJ: Anything else that you want to tease that you’re working on right now?
BP: I just finished a new short. It’s called Shuteye Hotel. It’s a Hitchcock murder mystery. It’s not so much funny – it’s kind of along the lines of Idiots and Angels, but it’s a short. It just got accepted into the Tribeca Film Festival. That’ll be the world premiere – end of April, beginning of May.
TJ: Is there anything the interviewers haven’t asked you about Guide Dog that you wish they had?
BP: Hm – well one question that I think is really important for filmmakers is why they become animators. I think that’s a really important question, and there’s a lot of different reasons for it. I do it not for the money, although I do need the money, and not for the awards or the criticism, but it’s to hear the audience laugh. To me, that is the reason I make the films. I think that’s really important. If you’re making films, if you’re spending a lot of time on your own, spending a lot of your money – you want to get something back. And for me, it’s the appreciation and love of the audience.
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