Bill Plympton — Director | Biography, Movies & Career

Biography

Bill Plympton (born April 30, 1946) is an American animator, director, graphic designer, cartoonist, screenwriter and producer best known for his 1987 Academy Award-nominated animated short Your Face and his series of shorts Guard Dog, Guide Dog, Hot Dog and Horn Dog.

Plympton's illustrations and cartoons have been published in The New York Times and the weekly newspaper The Village Voice, as well as in the magazines Vogue, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Penthouse, and National Lampoon. His political cartoon strip Plympton, which began in 1975 in the SoHo Weekly News, eventually was syndicated and appeared in over 20 newspapers. In 1988, his animated short Your Face was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. He also became known for other animated short films, including 25 Ways to Quit Smoking (1989) and Enemies (1991), the latter of which was part of the Animania series on MTV, where many of his other shorts were shown.

In 1992, his self-financed, first feature-length animated film, The Tune debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. His work also appeared on the 1992–1993 Fox comedy series The Edge. In 1993, he made his first live action film, J. Lyle. In 1995, he contributed animation and graphics to a computer game collection, Take Your Best Shot. He also published a comic book in 2003, The Sleazy Cartoons of Bill Plympton. Plympton's 2008 80-minute feature, Idiots and Angels presented by Terry Gilliam, had no dialogue. Plympton directed the segment "On Eating and Drinking" in the 2014 animated film The Prophet, adapted from Kahlil Gibran's book The Prophet. In 2020, Plympton released a Kickstarter for his new animated comedy western, Slide. The funding was successful and Plympton had planned on finishing the film by 2022.