News

Independent animator Bill Plympton, a two-time Oscar nominee, will appear in person at the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque on Thursday, April 14, at 7pm with his latest animated feature Idiots and Angels. He will answer questions after the movie and give every attendee who wants one a free signed sketch, drawn on the spot. Tickets cost $12; Cinematheque members and CIA students & staff $8. Tickets can be purchased at the door starting at 6pm on 4/14. The Cinematheque accepts cash and checks only.

Plympton, who is also a cartoonist, is one of the most prominent independent animators working today. In a career spanning four decades, he has made over 30 short cartoons (including Oscar nominees Your Face and Guard Dog) and five hand-drawn features (including The Tune and I Married a Strange Person). Plympton has a distinctive minimalist style in which pencil sketches come to surreal life, and pliable, putty-faced characters morph endlessly into grotesque variations of themselves, often suffering violence or other indignities. Plympton’s diabolically funny, subversive work has been seen for decades in film festivals, animation compilations, and on MTV; he has also done animated music videos for Kanye West and “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Idiots and Angels follows a misanthropic barfly, an asshole everyman, who tries to stop himself from performing out-of-character good deeds after he sprouts a pair of wings. The film has no dialogue but there is music by Tom Waits, Pink Martini, and others. The New York Times recently designated the film a “Critics’ Pick,” calling it “Plympton’s best animated feature… Toulouse-Lautrec by way of Charles Bukowski… Relentless and brilliant.” Idiots and Angels will be preceded by Plympton’s new short The Cow Who Wanted To Be a Hamburger (2010), which was short-listed for the 2011 Academy Awards. Both films will repeat on Saturday, April 16 at 9:05pm, but Plympton will not attend that screening. Tickets to the Saturday show cost $9; Cinematheque members and CIA students & staff $6.

Both shows will take place in the Aitken Auditorium of the Cleveland Institute of Art, 11141 East Boulevard in University Circle, telephone 216.421.7450, cia.edu/cinematheque. There is free parking for filmgoers in the adjacent Institute lot, located north of the building off of East Boulevard.

See the Plain Dealer's article on the event.