Your Face (1987)

The beauty of "Your Face" is in the way Plympton got a very simple idea--How many ways can you morph a face?--and then elegantly and effectively hand-illustrated the frames to bring that creative idea to rampaging life on the screen.It took the short animation scene (via the old Tournee) by storm; an immediate fave of one and all!One of the wonders of it, as the piece proceeds, is seeing Plympton's knack for imagining and capturing the "dynamics"--a surprisingly close approximation of the behaviors of the physical system he's "modeling".And it all couldn't have happened to a nicer guy: Met Plympton in Angouleme in 2000, and he was a pleasure to chat with about his latest (at the time) project.

"Your Face" is a 3-minute cartoon by Bill Plympton that brought him one of his two Oscar nominations. And while I can see some creativity in here, I still must say that this was not a good watch overall. It is pretty bizarre, almost awkward to watch, but in terms of what I saw exactly I was not too impressed. A head keeps transforming for 3 minutes basically into the weirdest shapes before it gets sucked in by the ground. And fittingly with that strange little movie we also hear a song, named like the film, where I am not sure if it was really bad or not. It was very unique though, so I guess that's a good thing right? I personally thought all in all the song and the film as a whole were fairly mediocre and not Academy Award (nomination) worthy. I do not recommend this almost 30-year-old film. Thumbs down.

I was weaned on the cartoons of Tex Avery, the master of the grotesque but never gruesome. This was the first cartoon I saw from Bill Plympton back in the late 80's; obviously I was fascinated/ couldn't understand it - but I still laughed like a drain. Over the years since all the daft and savage work from Plympton I watched began to make some sense until I now regard this as somewhat of a classic; some things take time. And it's only 3 minutes long too!A caricature of a crooner warbles a weird Your Face Is Like A Song while his face contorts in utterly mind (and head-)boggling ways - that's all there is, what more could anyone want from a spoiler? It's literally side-splitting sometimes and eye-poppingly gruesome at others, although actually Plympton was holding himself back and got even more grotesque later. I needed some final barbarity at the end of the cartoon though; did the Earth merely have to smack its lips after swallowing up the crooner? My personal Plympton favourite was 25 Ways To Quit Smoking mainly because it was very apt for me at the time... although generally the advice given in either that or How To Kiss are best ignored! He can be very hit or miss at times, but is so quick and bizarre he's usually worth a look - this is the best starting point.

As odd as this may sound, I first saw "Your Face" on the Lifetime Channel as I was laying in a hospital room, recovering from major surgery. "Your Face" seemed to fit then and it seems to fit now and always.Although Plympton had made several cartoons prior to "Your Face," this is the fist time we see the style his work is noted for: impossibly grotesque body deformations done for laughs, and funny, too. We watch and see everything that could possibly happen to the singer's head, including abstract reduction. All through the strange looking singer seems blissfully unaware of what's being done to him as he sings a song that is a perfect parody of the ballad and touching, as well.As with later films, Plympton does little if anything to signal us if we should laugh, be horrified, or just creeped out. This sense of subtlety is what makes his films so enjoyable to me.Although only three minutes long, this is a perfectly complete, self-contained masterpiece of animation.Bill Plympton rules!