Paley and Plympton Rock Tribeca

By David B. Levy

In case you haven't heard, Nina Paley and Bill Plympton were the toast of the Tribeca film festival with their respective features. While both are NY-based independent features, they could not be more different in tone, subject, technique, or even in business model. As these are "independent" features, I suppose that is precisely the point. The promise of the indy animated feature film is that no two films need be alike. The good news is that Paley's feature "Sita Sings the Blues," and Bill's feature, "Idiots and Angels," are each satisfying films, offering hope and inspiration to all the subsequent filmmakers that dare to follow in their wake.

For decades, the short independent animated film has been the calling card of small boutique-style studios and individuals, helping them establish identities in the international festival community. Some, such as Bill Plympton, Pat Smith, and PES have aggressively used their films as stepping-stones to land careers directing commercials, which in-turn, pay for their short films. It's a happy marriage of art and commerce, allowing these independent filmmakers to spend up to half their year laboring on personal projects.

This model went unchanged (or unchallenged) until present time because the old model of production (cells, 35mm film stock, lab fees, etc) was time consuming and cost prohibitive. Bill Plympton, who organizes his shop as a mini-factory, was virtually alone in the animation world, making independent animated feature films in the closing decade of shooting animation on film.

At the start of his animation career, Plympton quickly became one of the world's most celebrated filmmakers with an early string of award winning films such as, "Your Face," "One of those Days," and, "How to Quit Smoking." Such instant success naturally encouraged him to continue making shorts, but it also inspired the filmmaker to move his target to something bigger. Plympton's official bio posted on his website, tells; "...he wanted a new challenge" - and, "I'd wanted to make a full-length movie ever since I was a kid."

Nina Paley's short film, "Stork" showed an early tendency for this filmmaker to mine her personal life for source material. "Sita Sings the Blue's" clever (and accurate) tagline is, "The greatest break-up story ever told." Through the film, viewers learn how Paley found comfort, solace, and inspiration in the ages old Indian epic, The Ramayana. It is the on-again/off-again romance between Rama and Sita that parallels the real life break up of Paley's marriage. While Paley has been previewing bits of Sita as shorts for years now, the pieces take on a greater meaning when seen as part of her narrative thrust. What I used to experience as lushly designed and beautiful stylized flash animation, now had the additional power of making me cry. I felt the sting of each of Sita's disappointments as well as the super human power of her determination.

In some ways, Paley lets the viewer, and herself, off the hook in her treatment of her real-life self. First off, she creates distance by rendering herself and her husband in scratchy simplistic child-like drawings. The autobiographical sections look like they were far speedier to animate than other sections of the film, perhaps revealing Paley's reluctance to spend too much time rehashing painful memories. In all, the film is composed of four different styles. There's the aforementioned flash animated Sita song sections and child like self-portraits, set alongside painterly historic depictions of The Ramayana, chattering Indian accented shadow puppets narrating the epic myth, and (for dramatic effect) a rotoscoped inferno dance number which hits right as Paley's cartoon alter-ego is dumped by her husband via an e-mail! With, "Sita Sings the Blues," Paley makes her lemons into lemonade and the end result is not just a great film, but much more significantly an affirmation of life.

Bill Plympton's features share some common ingredients besides the obvious Plympton animation aesthetic. All of his animated features from "The Tune," through "Idiots and Angels," revolve around individuals processing special talents, which evil corporate forces seek to exploit or control for their own gain. Look past the sex, violence, and humor in his features, and you'll see this very personal recurring theme. "Idiots and Angels," follows this theme once again, but, the core of this film is one man's struggle with a gift that he didn't ask for and how it intrudes in his life, work, and finally, his fate.

Plympton's first two features, "The Tune," and "I Married a Strange Person," were patch-work creations, stitching together previously made shorts with the titular plotlines. His third feature, "Mutant Aliens," was his most cohesive to date, and was followed by the ambitious "Hair High." The latter film was also Plympton's attempt to tell a more straight forward dialogue-driven story, even enlisting help from top notch celebrity voices. Happily, the filmmaker seems most at home in his newest feature, "Idiots and Angels." The setting of the late 1940s and early 50s is Plympton's favorite period and the art styling (he and art director Biljana Lubovic have crafted) gives the film an edge over his previous feature productions. In short, the mood and story are partly advanced via the color styling and layouts, which both support and even inform character. Early in the film, I worried that I didn't get enough sense of who the main character was. My concern was that I wouldn't care about him. As the film unfolded, I was proved wrong again and again. The main character, so unlikable in the first act, gradually develops to the point where the audience becomes deeply invested. Plympton is hardly done making features, but, I would wager that he's hit upon his first fully satisfying film in this challenging long format.

While Plympton takes on commercial work to pay for the privilege to play in features, Paley took the opposite approach and spent the greater part of the last few years turning down work so to give her the time to focus on Sita. Ralph Bakshi, the grandfather of independent feature animation, recently chastised an audience of SVA students. Bakshi predicted that they won't have the guts to make independent animated features because, "...they want jobs instead." The amazing thing about Bakshi, Plympton, and Paley is that they have made their films, "their jobs." However you slice it, there's no shortage of creative ways to produce an independent animated feature film and the next few years will undoubtedly bare this out.