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THE DON AND BILL SHOW: SLIGHTLY BENT

Once members of animation’s elite Spike and Mike’s Twisted Animation Festival, Don Hertzfeldt and Bill Plympton have been plucked from the collective and placed together to create their own traveling film capade, The Don and Bill Show. This showcase of perverse and awkward animated shorts arrives as an affirmation that ingenious comedy and animation can indeed exist in a field seemingly dominated by corporate networks.

King of the fine-lined Sharpie, Hertzfeldt creates a world combining equal parts stick-figure technology, painful optimism, and talent for the grotesque and obscene. Reminiscent of Liquid Television’s "Stick Figure Theater" (MTV), the familiar linear images draw the eye, even when these childhood icons erupt with violence, ignorance, and paranoia. Hertzfeldt, the trench-coat flasher of animation, exposes us to the blood, confusion, and absurdity no one should overlook, reaching an apocalyptic crescendo with the show’s finale, "Rejected."

Plympton, on the other hand, creates a world where anything is possible, seamlessly melding one frame into another, creating visual fantasies as reality. Here, men can swallow their own heads ("25 Ways to Quit Smoking"), women can be turned into bullfrogs ("Eat"), and Elvis can consume and expel an entire city skyline ("Elvis"). He makes the expression "The building has left Elvis" seem like common sense.

With this duo, simplicity reigns: A plus B equals funny. In Hertzfeldt’s "Billy’s Balloon," the inverse becomes the joke when the balloon starts hitting poor Billy, as retribution for a life of Billy hitting it. Simple plot, simple characters, simply ingenious.

BY JANINE VIAZUE

Issue Date: February 14 - 21, 2002
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