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Since 2002, the Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation & Technology has highlighted independent film worldwide. Once an international event visiting cities across four continents, the festival ultimately made Portland its permanent home by 2022.
PFCAT returns this August at OMSI, with events at the museum’s Empirical Theater, as well as the Kendall Planetarium, from Thursday through Sunday, Aug. 3-6. And on Friday, Aug. 4, the Empirical Theater will play host to Oregon animator Bill Plympton, with a retrospective of his works and clips from his upcoming feature, Slide, plus Q&A and autograph sessions.
In his field, Plympton is an international treasure. Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons, called him “the god of animation,” though in a 2012 interview at Australia’s Gold Coast Film Festival, Plympton humorously asserts that Groening was drunk at the time.
Fittingly for a friend of Groening’s, Plympton’s portfolio includes a Simpsons couch gag in the style of his own Oscar-nominated 1987 short Your Face. He also animated “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Don’t Download This Song” music video, which was nominated for an Annie. Many of Plympton’s animations, short and long form alike, are distinctly quirky and surreal, consistently using colored pencils for texture.
Plympton was born in Portland in 1946, and raised on a farm in Oregon City. “It was a gentleman’s farm…my father was a banker at Oregon Savings Bank,” he tells WW, adding, “It was closer to Estacada. There were a lot of logging trucks that came by at all hours.”
Plympton’s rural childhood is something he has in common with fellow animator Don Bluth, who grew up on a dairy farm in Payson, Utah. Like Bluth, Plympton was greatly influenced by early animated Walt Disney films; his first exposure to animation was seeing Disney’s Sleeping Beauty at age 13. Plympton also cites visual influences in Tex Avery, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Jacques Tati, whose 1958 film Mon Oncle made Plympton’s 2008 Criterion Collection Top 10.
Growing up in the rural stretches of Clackamas County helped shape Slide. Plympton describes the film as being about a logging town, where “there’s a lot of lumberjacks, fishermen, and fog…and corruption. A mystical Clint Eastwood-type cowboy gets rid of the bad guys with his music.”
The music of Slide Guitar (the cowboy’s name) takes after the old country musicians Plympton’s father liked, such as Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and Patsy Cline. “I played a lot of slide guitar when I was younger, when I moved to New York,” he says.
Animation can be a time-intensive labor of love, and Slide is no exception. “I did every drawing on this film,” Plympton says. “It’s about 40,000 drawings. It’s pretty rare, but for me, it was a joy. It took me seven years. COVID made it difficult to finance.” For that financing, Plympton turned to Kickstarter. As of May 10, 2023, 593 backers had pledged a total of $84,145, slightly above the campaign’s goal of $77,800.
Earlier this year, Slide was a “feature film contrechamp” (literally “reverse shot,” figuratively “out of competition”) official selection at the Annecy Festival in France. Also present at Annecy this year was Guillermo del Toro, whose Oscar-winning stop-motion adaptation of Pinocchio was partly produced at ShadowMachine in Portland, as well as del Toro’s own studio in Guadalajara.
The success of Pinocchio has raised hopes that more animated films made outside Hollywood can prosper. “I am happy that they do have a category [at the Oscars] for animated features,” Plympton says. “Slide has a shot, thanks to Guillermo, to get noticed at the Academy.” He anticipates Slide will be completed by September of this year.
Plympton adds, “If Mel Brooks became a cartoonist, and Clint Eastwood too, and they made a film together, it’d be something like Slide.” Who could resist that pitch?
SEE IT: Bill Plympton will attend the 2023 Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation & Technology at OMSI’s Empirical Theater, 1945 SE Water Ave., Suite 100, 503-797-4000, omsi.edu. 8 pm Friday, Aug. 4. $25.