Angel is a selfish, abusive, morally bankrupt man who hangs out as his local bar, berating the other patrons. One day, Angel mysteriously wakes up with a pair of wings on his back. The wings make him do good deeds, contrary to his nature. He desperately tries to rid himself of the good wings, but eventually finds himself fighting those who view the wings as their ticket to fame and fortune.
Even without a word of dialogue, Plympton's dark fable about the almost unnatural redemption of a lost soul content in its damnation is easily understood, and neatly told.
Good battles evil as a gun-running, booze-swilling, cigarette-puffing badass is dragged, kicking and screaming, toward salvation in Bill Plympton's slyly sardonic black comedy, his best animated feature to date.
Beautifully creepy... Less concerned with gags than nimble storytelling and wide-screen aesthetics (every brooding corner of the frame is blotted in monochromatic noir hues), Plympton mines elegance from the utterly gonzo.
Now in his early sixties, Plympton has made his most accomplished feature...his characters resemble images in motion rather than full-on animations, as if a Looney Tunes cartoon made love to a Ralph Steadman sketch.
Although this is, in part, a darkly comic exploration of man's inhumanity to man, there is a current of optimism, flowing like the artwork, beneath the story.
A loathsome man who spends his days in a bar and enjoys squashing butterflies grows a pair of wings on his back that have a mind of their own. It features great non-verbal, animated storytelling and inventive animation in that mildly surreal Bill Plympton style, a hip soundtrack by Pink Martini and Tom Waits, and
comedy that's wicked and dark without surrendering to nihilism. An under-the-radar winner.
November 17, 2011
Greg S
Super Reviewer
Another decent surreal animation by Bill Plympton. Remarkably done without any dialogue.
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