n 1992, independent animator Bill Plympton made history with The Tune, the first full-length feature film to be drawn and colored by a single artist. His follow-up, 1996's I Married a Strange Person!, took his animation to a new level: more stylized, more colorful and more graphically gross. Plympton plans to release his third animated feature, Mutant Aliens, later this year. As a preview (and a fund-raiser: Plympton produces and directs all his own work, and he's made it clear that keeping the bills paid up is an ongoing issue for his small studio), he's publishing this detailed storyboard of the film as a black-and-white graphic novel.
The Mutant Aliens book begins as a beaming astronaut, Earl Jensen, is ushered into space by his beaming daughter Josie and a coterie of beaming scientists. Everybody seems blissfully happy, at least until Jensen's capsule hits orbit and one of the scientists, Dr. Frubar, ejects all of his fuel. Earl, unable to return to Earth, is ordered to read a conveniently pre-written speech decrying the Department of Space's lack of funding, and pleading for donations to prevent similar future catastrophes.
Twenty years later, Dr. Frubar is in charge of a thriving (and highly commercial) Department of Space, while Josie obsessively watches the skies for any sign of her father. When Earl's space capsule suddenly returns to Earth, Josie barely manages to keep the Department from shooting it down. Earl emerges, haggard and disheveled, to tell a wild story of a peanut-shaped planet populated by peaceful bipedal noses who treated him like a god, and vengeful bipedal eyeballs who captured him and took him to their leader. Earl's audience laughs in disbelief--until a giant nose steps out of his capsule. Earl becomes an instant celebrity, but throughout the ticker-tape parades and the meeting with the president, he can't stop talking about how much he wants to see his old "friend" Dr. Frubar. When Frubar finally does appear, it rapidly becomes clear that Earl's weird tale was just a cover for an elaborate--and grotesque--revenge scheme.
Sick stuff, but uniquely sick stuff
Bill Plympton is best known for his outrageously hysterical animated shorts, such as "25 Ways to Quit Smoking," "How to Kiss" and the Oscar-nominated "Your Face." His full-length films are less artistically successful by comparison--both are so joltingly segmented that they seem overextended and uneven. Mutant Aliens is something of a turning point for Plympton's writing. It features his most linear, narrative plot to date. As a result, it flows very well as a comic book. It may even work better in this format than as a film; lackluster pacing can be a problem in Plympton features, but readers can set their own pace when reading a comic book.
They can also take their time to appreciate Plympton's artwork, which is usually rushing by at blur-inducing speed. The animator's distinctive rough-hewn, slapdash pencil sketches are surprisingly intricate on close examination. Plympton pointedly took the time to add fine details to his storyboard, knowing he would later publish it, and his individual panels look weighty and almost three-dimensional. His unruly, abstract shading still gives his images a rough sense of movement, and it's easy to picture the finished product in full motion.
It's a little difficult to imagine some of this material in the theater, however. Throughout his career, Plympton has constantly pushed the envelope of the offensive, the profane and the just plain strange. Mutant Aliens is no exception. It's a fast-moving compendium of twisted sex acts, weird slapstick, exaggerated cartoon violence and goofy visual jokes. At times it's simply crude, particularly in the pointless gags involving poorly timed masturbation or mutant poop. At other times, it raises "bizarre" to a new and inspired level, as when Earl narrates his near-execution by a giant disembodied tongue. Throughout, it's grimmer and less lighthearted than Plympton's usual work. Still, it's whimsical, unpredictable and unlike anything else on the market, and that alone marks it as vintage Plympton.
