Slide

Sourdough Creek, a logging town few miles north of nowhere, is sprucing up for a major motion picture shoot. The town’s corrupt mayors, Jeb and Zeke, plan to raze a fishing village to build a resort, crushing all resistance at the barrel of a gun. But in their way stands the combined force of Hellbug, a fearsome super-insect that inhabits the adjoining woods, and Slide, a masked avenger who doubles as a guitar-playing cowboy at the local watering hole.

Veteran independent animator Bill Plympton’s genre-bending new feature Slide presents a heady concoction of elements from Westerns, comedies, musicals and Creature Features, brought to life by a personal, idiosyncratic vision of backwoods America. Ecological and political themes find their way into a quirky, constantly inventive narrative with an appealing lightness of touch.

Plympton’s scratchy hand-drawn style is dominated by simple art-brut contours overlaid with coiled lines that lend the figures a pulsating, nervous energy. Features are exaggerated and rendered grotesque; frames are dropped to create a discontinuous, stop-motion-like effect; perspective, proportion, polish – everything is subordinated to vividness of expression. Drawing the viewer into an utterly eccentric universe, Slide offers a memorable work of animation throbbing with personality and soul.

– Srikanth Srinivasan

Did you know that Bill Plympton will be joining us for a Talk this year? Find out more here.