-Interview by Steve Ogden

There are animators who work late into the night in a labor of love for their craft. But dwarfing pretty much all of them all is animator Bill Plympton. Watching this guy, I feel like a sloth in the forest, watching the hyperactive squirrel prepare for the winter. Singlehandedly, Plympton has finished Hair High, yet another feature film. Yes, that's right. A feature film. By himself. And it's not his first one.

Hair High is in fact Plympton's fifth film, and long time fans of Plympton's work will not be disappointed. Hair High has his trademark cartoony style, morphing characters, extreme camera angles and whacky humor. But the film also has a lot to recommend it to new audiences. I've always enjoyed Bill's work, but even I wasn't sure I could take a feature length dose of Plympton. But I'm happy to report that the story's structure is built on the sturdy bones of a love triangle revenge, and harkens back to many great films, Stephen King's Carrie among them.

The movie features an all-star cast including the voice talents of Dermot Mulroney, Sarah Silverman, David Carradine, Keith Carradine, Beverly D'Angelo, Martha Plimpton, Eric Gilliland, Ed Begley Jr., Michael Showalter, Zak Orth, Justin Long, Craig Bierko, Tom Noonan and animators Matt Groening and Don Hertzfeldt. Hair High also features songs by Hank Bones and Maureen McElheron. The film hits all the right notes, and even offers a few surprises along the way.

As he prepares for Hair High's exclusive run at L.A.'s Laemmle Sunset theatre (beginning Apr 13, 2007 - details HERE), this prolific animator took time out of his schedule for an interview.

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NOTE: To listen to my entire interview with Bill, see the Official AnimWatch Podcast, Episode #4 from Apr 11, 2007.

OGDEN: What inspired the movie?

PLYMPTON: It was actually the result of a dream I had. Usually I don't use dreams for films because they're just too whacky. But this one was very intriguing and I thought it would make a good film. The dream was about this car at the bottom of a lake, and inside the car were two skeletons. And there were bugs crawling in and out of their skulls, and fish swimming around the car, and their hair was blowing in the current. And then all the sudden, the car starts. The lights turn on, and the car startslurching forward in the mud and the muck, runs across the bottom of the lake and up on the shore and on into the High School Senior Prom. That's where I woke up. And I thought, Gee, that's kind of an interesting image. Maybe I can make something out of it.

So I went back to my high school yearbook and a lot of my high school memories. I brought up some urban myths and legends and stories people had told me. I thought I had enough material to make a really interesting 50's gothic revenge comedy.

OGDEN: It also answers that great question about what does Bill Plympton dream about.

PLYMPTON: Yeah, it does. I must tell you that most of my dreams are fairly mundane. But this one was very vivid. It was very memorable and very visual. So I thought it would make a great film.

OGDEN: What does a script look like for something like this?

PLYMPTON: I really don't use scripts. I generally just make a storyboard as a graphic novel.The script would not make sense because you need a script for a big crew. Since I don't have a big crew, it's just me doing the artwork, a storyboard is sufficient.

Most of the ideas are visual, there's not a lot of dialog in the graphic novel. Once I have that done, I just start on Page One and start drawing the animation. When I'm going, I can do a lot of artwork. I can do 20, maybe even 30 seconds of finished animation a day. That's about 100 to 200 drawings.

OGDEN: How in the world can you go that quickly?

PLYMPTON: When I wake up in the morning, I visualize every shot that I want to do that day. So I see it very clearly in my brain. Basically, I'm just tracing the images from my brain onto the paper. So it does go fairly fast.

Of course, I don't do it on Ones.* I just don't have the time or the patience. I don't even think that Ones is particularly that much better looking than Threes or Fours which is what I do it on. So that helps.

And I use cycles**, I use zooms and pans and things like that. So that's how I'm able to do 20 to 30 seconds a day.

When I wake up in the morning, I visualize every shot that I want to do that day. So I see it very clearly in my brain. Basically, I'm just tracing the images from my brain onto the paper. So it does go fairly fast. --Bill Plympton

OGDEN: And how faithful do you stay to those boards?

PLYMPTON: About 95% faithful, I think. Sometimes I'll get an idea and want to go off on a little tangent, do something a little crazy and put some jokes in there that might come to me on the spur of the moment. And then obviously I will see some sequences that don't work at all and are not helpful to the story or not particularly funny and I'll cut them out. So, well, maybe 90% of the original graphic novel is what you'll see.

OGDEN: Can you give me an example of something that changed during production?

PLYMPTON: For Hair High, I thought up this sort of tonic called Tijuana Tonic which is basically Spanish Fly. And I wanted to go back into the history of it. I created this whole mythology of how it was created by one of the witch doctors of the Aztec culture. He put all these exotic ingredients together and it became this sexual potion.

I put it in the film, and although I liked it, I just didn't think it worked very well in the film and so it's out. Of course I'll probably put it on the DVD when that comes out. But that was a sequence I thought would be very funny, and it just wasn't.