Nose Hair

This Bill Plympton film is quite different from most. While it has some of the traditional colored pencil animation you may be used to seeing, the story itself is a strange stream of consciousness piece that is very surreal and odd...yet compelling at the same time. It is NOT laugh out loud funny like some of his films, but is still well worth seeing.

It begins with a guy pulling on a nose hair. It did NOT go where I thought it would but instead the hair became an ever-changing device on which the leading character moved and interacted. It's very hard to explain and you really just have to see it to understand and appreciate it.

Why, then, did I give it a 7? Well, while fun, it lacked the insane humor I love in other Plympton shorts and at times the artwork was rather rudimentary and crudely drawn. Still, it is well worth seeing--particularly to weird folks like myself who love this man's work.

Bill Plympton's work is, even at its tamest, exceptionally strange and odd. It would be fair to call him animation's David Lynch, save that even Lynch isn't this weird! This short is even more the oddity than normal, even for Plympton. The most accurate description is to say it defies description. This grows on you after a bit-nose hair as anti-hero, an unusual scenario indeed. Plympton is an acqured taste, to be sure, but this one is recommended for the adventurous. I found it on Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation Vol, 4. Worth watching.