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Mondo Plympton is a fantastic journey through the strange brain of off-the-wall animator Bill Plympton, featuring his classic shorts, rare excerpts, plus brand new work and stories from his animated life. This roller-coaster ride traces both plympton's life and art. When Plympton first moved to New York in 1968, he started selling hells on the street - failing dismally, the subject for a short right there. From there he commenced a year of study at the School of Visual Arts, which led to his first work as an illustrator and cartoonist. Since his early days, his cartoons have appealed in magazines such as Penthouse, Rolling Stone, National Lampoon and Glamour, and his animated shorts have featured on MTV.
This thoroughly eclectic bag of goodies is held together by an animated Plympton revealing some of the anecdotes which shaped (or failed to shape) his life: his early years, where the violence in his films comes from, and his confrontation with the Disney machine. Included are a number of his classic films, from Boomtown, his first animated production, on through 1995's How to Make Love to a Woman as well as some commercials banned because of their violence.
Mondo Plympton reveals the diversity as well as the core of Plympton's unique, surreal and at times controversial take on American culture. His 1991 Push Comes to Shove (which won the 1991 Prix du Jury at Cannes) is a classic example of his unusual bent, wherein two deadpan male protagonists fold, spindle and otherwise mutilate each other to delirious lengths. Labelled at times as violent, sexist and careless, Mondo Plympton is sure to stir debate about the purpose of animation as it pushes the boundaries of artistic and social convention.
Bill Plympton was born in Oregon in 1946, a city he credits with nurturing his drawing skills and imagination. Aside from his numerous short animations, featured in Mondo Plympton, his features include The Tune (1992), new short Sex and Violence and the feature length I Married a Strange Person, both included in this year's Animagic spotlight.