The Tune (1992)

I was introduced to Bill Plympton's animation style in college, with just a handful of shorts, not including (oddly enough) the Oscar-nominated Your Face (I'm pretty sure I've never seen it, though I could be wrong). 25 Ways to Quit Smoking I definitely saw and found endearingly absurd and prettily animated. Having a best friend who is actively interested in animation and animators, my interest was re-ignited in Plympton and I picked this film up on a whim, knowing it was his first-ever feature-length, but having heard that it ran more like a sort of collection of shorts.Del (voiced by Daniel Neiden) is a songwriter (more in the Brill Building sense than the James Taylor sense) who has just been given a 47 minute deadline by boss Mr. Mega (voiced by Marty Nelson), with only girlfriend Didi (voiced by Maureen McElheron, who wrote the film's songs and co-wrote the story with Bill) to encourage him as he sets out on the road after hitting his personal writer's block ("My love for you/Is equal to.....?"). After the spectre of the withering criticism emerges randomly to chide Del, he finds himself in an extremely complex cloverleaf (in the highway sense) which leads him out into an unusual place--where the Mayor (also voiced by Nelson) introduces him with the film's first full song--"Flooby Nooby." The town (of the same name) is used to try and bring Del to a more pure method of songwriting--not attempting to calculate a pop hit but to act on feeling instead. From here he wanders from place to place, with song after song sung to him (whether in his head or a truly bizarre alternate universe we can't be 100% sure) trying to bring him to the song that will impress Mr. Mega.Plympton's animation style is extremely easy to recognize--most of it is composed of coloured-pencil-based line drawings with "realistically cartoony" characters, with strong, life-like shading on cartoon-proportioned faces (cheeks, in particular, often have extremely dark shading at their bottom edges, especially on smiles). Some parts of this film, though, wander into other styles; the frames displaying the lyrics of "Flooby Nooby," for instance, are static images shown in a rapid-fire motion to match the tempo of the song. Most of it, though, is in the trademark Plympton style, with faces made of play-doh, resembling Gumby-style stop-motion, only smoother and brighter, cleaner and certainly stranger. The character designs are all wonderfully varied (a plump body with a thin head and a tiny brush of red hair for Del, a huge nose that takes up the entire face of the Mayor and so on) and fascinating--despite their lack of realism and the strange things that often happen to the characters, the faces are somehow "believable" anyway. As with the rest of Plympton's work I've seen, there's a beautiful quality to the animation that makes it seem easy to swallow (in belief terms) even when a door opens in a man's face and out jumps a smaller version of him that runs around and opens another door--you never have any idea what on earth to expect of it, but it just keeps going and all surprises you just a little, yet simultaneously comes out in a way that your brain completely accepts (though not without an element of, "Holy crap! That is so bizarre...and awesome!" The one disappointing element is unavoidable--Plympton put the film together piece by piece as he had money, and the varying styles of segments can be jarring when they switch, or at least a little off-putting. So long as you think of it as a collection of segments though, it isn't too bothersome.The major criticism I've seen levelled at this film is mostly directed at McElheron's music. I think some of it misses the point (one person was disappointed at how "normal" it was, for instance). Plympton and McElheron were acting on their love for American roots music, and that seemed easy enough to gather to me--when you're clearly wandering from showtune to mid-period country (post-Hank Williams but pre-modern, slick, cookie cutter garbage) to blues to "surf" music, it seems to me it's obvious that Del is wandering through basic musical tropes because his business is not writing fantastically experimental music, but writing a hit. That's what Mr. Mega wants and, in some fashion, what Del wants, even after he decides to pull it from his heart instead of his brain. The songs, however, are a little weak sometimes--simplistic instrumentation occasionally douses a song that seems like it should have more (exceptions being the blues song, for instance, which fits naturally with simple orchestration), but generally they are saved by fascinatingly absurd lyrics to match Plympton's mentality. It's not an obvious pattern of absurdity or the bland calculated absurdity of those who simply copy the kind they've already seen, but the kind that turns corners you didn't even know were there, let alone that one could turn at them. My criticism extends more to Neiden's weak (and slightly irritating) performance as Del. It's reminiscent of Emo Phillips, but without the feeling that there is a speech impediment involved--intrinsic or contrived, whichever, seeming drawn out and artificial, often calling more attention than it should to the economic animation Plympton uses (most likely to save money). On the same note, two animated films based around music are amongst my favourite films of all time--Yellow Submarine (a favourite of Plympton's apparently) and The Point. Let's just say none of these singers are Harry Nilsson, nor are they Lennon, McCartney or Harrison (but possibly Ringo--which is not meant as denigrating from me, as Yellow Submarine made him my favourite Beatle for a long time).But, Plympton's animation gradually takes the film in increasingly surreal directions and brings the focus more to itself and away from the audio (which instead ends up helpfully complementary instead of dominant), making the film tremendously enjoyable and simultaneously fascinating.