It's only natural that Bill Plympton would get asked a lot about carpal tunnel syndrome.
After all, the veteran artist/animator, and two-time Oscar nominee, has just completed another do-it-yourself feature -- the noir fantasy Idiots and Angels -- for which he personally drew more than 25,000 cells
"In fact, my hand feels pretty good. It seems to thrive on drawing," Plympton, 63, says over the phone from his New York studio. "It's been a habit of mine since I was four years old, drawing pencil on paper. It's almost like a drug. Some people call me a workaholic, but I'm more like a hedonist. It's like making love to my drawing board."
Those who doubt his claim have been able to watch him "make love" on the live "Ani-Cam" link on his website. On hiatus since he finished Idiots and Angels, he says the feature will be reactivated on Sept. 1 when he sits down to draw Cheatin' Heart, his personal-experience-based comedy about a love story gone wrong.
"I take my 25,000 drawings, I put them on my producer's desk -- Biljana Labovic -- and she parcels out the work to have it scanned, cleaned, composited, coloured and edited together. And then we send it out to musicians and they give us music and the sound editor makes the sound. It's a simple way ot make a film, it takes about two and a half years, beginning to end."
To say nothing of inexpensive. Idiots and Angels, a wordless movie which leans heavily on the mood music of Tom Waits, Pink Martini and Moby, clocked in at about $130,000. His more ambitious 2004 film Hair High, a high school horror comedy featuring the voices of Sarah Silverman, Dermot Mulroney and Beverly D'Angelo, cost $400,000.
"Human beings are expensive," he says with a laugh. "But as we sell overseas, it makes it much easier to distribute (non-dialogue films). And quite frankly, I've decided I don't like animating to dialogue. You're basically just drawing a moving mouth, which gets very boring."
Idiots and Angels tells the story of an irredeemably cruel barfly who finds the nubs of wings growing on his back one morning. The angelic appendage doesn't interfere with his regular activities of bullying, sexual harassment and mocking the meek and vulnerable.
As they grow, however, his personality changes -- even as certain sinister witnesses begin to covet them.
"A lot of people think Idiots and Angels is my most personal film and I tend to agree. I really see a lot of myself in that idiot guy. Even now, when I do somehting stupid I regret, like cut off somebody in traffic, I say 'Bill, don't be such an idiot. Be an angel.'
"It's a mystery to me where the idea came from. The first time I remember being conscious of it, I was in France showing Hair High, and someone asked me what my next film was. And off the top of my head I said , 'An assh---
wakes up one morning with wings on his back and doesn't like it because the wings make him do good things.' "
Though he confines himself to one medium, Plympton has been eclectic with it over the years. He's been a published cartoonist, a creator of TV ads, and a prolific producer of animated shorts -- his most famous being his "dog" series, starting with the Oscar-nominated Guard Dog.
"Growing up in Oregon, we had a dog called Plinky, and at 10 years old he got senile and started barking at the garbage man, the mailman, the delivery man. And I wondered why dogs need to bark. That inspired Guard Dog and it went on from there.
"Now I do a dog film every year. It's probably where I make most of my money. In November, I'll start drawing my fifth, about a Customs dog that sniffs for drugs at airports."
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