Plymptoons at ASU

By Jonathan McNamara

It's appropriate that Bill Plympton's latest cartoon is about a murder. He gets away with it all the time.

Where most animators would concentrate on making characters move fluidly, Plympton prefers stick with a bare minimum of frames per second. Often a character walking down a street is just the same three or four frames used repeatedly. The results are a bit jerky yet amazingly endearing. Not bad for an animator working solo.

Where have you seen him? Perhaps as part of The Animation Show, an annual traveling show curated by none other than animating greats Mike Judge of Beavis and Butthead fame and Don Hertzfeldt who is perhaps most famous for the line "my spoon's too big."

You can see Plympton's minimalist magic is his latest called Shuteye Hotel as well as several other short films at ASU's Short Film and Video Festival this Saturday.