Bill Plympton?s cartoons have always served up shocks with their humor. A legend for his one-man-band approach to making animated shorts, Plympton?s idiosyncratic style has, both literally and figuratively, pushed the limits of a medium usually reserved for feel-good animal fables and robotic thrill rides. Nominated for two Oscars (for 1987?s Your Face and 2004?s Guard Dog), his films have an eerie habit of thrusting viewers into the surrealistic center of his brain, from which they bare witness to the human body distorted in all manners possible. His latest, Shuteye Hotel, is no different. And, with its expressionistic angles and high body count, it?s also a macabre Halloween present for animation and horror lovers alike. Plympton spoke with us today from his New York studio about his love of genre, and how he?s managed to make a living as an independent animator for more than thirty years.

With its focus on sleep, Shuteye Hotel seems the kind of film that?s completely born out of nightmares.

What happened was I was going to a festival and stayed at a fancy hotel. The pillow was very plush, and I woke up in the morning and the pillow was actually engulfing my head. I thought, ?Wow, this pillow?s trying to eat my head!? Of course I thought, ?Well, that?s kind of an interesting idea, Why don?t I try to make a film about that?a pillow that eats people?s heads.? It?s sort of like one of those nightmares in which something that is very cute and kind and lovable turns into this evil entity. I thought that was a perfect idea for a film.

Like your features Mutant Aliens and Hair High, Shuteye Hotel is also a send-up of a particular genre.

Yes, it totally is. It?s like if Alfred Hitchcock made an animated film, this would be it. It would be like this.

And like Hitchcock?s work, it uses a variety of film techniques to generate suspense?but also, in this case, to mask any budget limitations.

Well, that?s an interesting story. With this film, I tried to use CGI, because everybody said, ?You gotta do a CGI. Everyone?s doing CGI. That?s the way to go.? So as you can see the hotel is a computer-generated picture. I?ll be honest with you?it was a nightmare. It took us way over budget. It took much longer than I had hoped, and I don?t know if it really adds that much. So I will probably not do CGI again. That?s the first time I ever worked CGI. We scan films on a computer, and composite them on a computer. But I?ve never generated imagery on a computer before.

Had you only started scanning the images on a computer in recent years?

Yeah, I think the first one we did was probably Guide Dog. I think that?s the first scanning we did.

Shuteye Hotel?s subject matter and genre meshes quite well with your style, which easily lends itself to, say, German expressionism.

Thank you. Yeah, that?s the look I was going for.

Even though this film?s story was sparked by a real-life incident, were there any particular films running through your mind as you worked on it?

Well, certainly Psycho. I think that?s obvious?the old hotel that?s dark and scary and almost abandoned. That kind of thing. That was definitely part of it. What?s the other one I?m thinking about??a famous Orson Welles film?

Touch of Evil?

Yes, Touch of Evil was an influence. Janet Leigh gets stuck in this hotel, and she?s trapped in a room and these people have to kill her. That kind of thing.

Shuteye Hotel?s score, with its jazzy riffs, is also reminiscent of that film?s. Did Touch of Evil influence the music as well?

Yes. The musician who did that, his name is Corey Jackson, he?s an LA guy. I first heard of him when they sent me his CD, and I liked it a lot and started using it a little bit on Guide Dog, and it worked really well. So I?ve used him for three or four of my films. When I told him I was gonna do this one, he said he?s a big fan of Bernard Hermann and always wanted to do a Bernard Hermann score. So he really fell in love with this project and did a great job. The music is such an important part of this film. So it was a fun project for him and for me too. But I must admit, it is a different kind of film than most people are used to from Bill Plympton. It?s not particularly funny. I guess it does have some violence, but it?s much more of a character-study mood piece. When I introduce it I say it?s gonna do for sleeping what Jaws did for swimming. I think it makes people think when they sleep that the bed is not the safest place in the world after all. That was sort of the point of the humor: some place that you actually feel safe and secure in is actually a dangerous territory.

I mentioned Mutant Aliens and Hair High earlier?do you have a particular affinity for genre films?

Of course, yeah. This new film I?m working on is called Idiots and Angels, and it?s a very sort of David Lynch kind of film?very mysterious, surreal, almost an eastern European type of film. So, yeah, I love specific genres. For me it just gives you more meat to work with.

Idiots and Angels will be a feature?

Yes. In fact, you can see part of it online. Search Idiots and Angels on YouTube and you should see a clip from it. It?s a scene where this guy starts growing wings and he?s learning to fly with those wings. He doesn?t like ?em but he?s learning to adapt to them. It?s very dark and Eastern European. We?re heavily into Idiots and Angels now. We want to start doing the festival circuit in January. So we?re really crunched between the deadlines. And also I?m about to begin on a new Guard Dog short, that will hopefully be done by February.

So you see Guard Dog as an ongoing series of shorts then?

Absolutely. He?s sort of like my Mickey Mouse. The dog is very popular with everybody. So I really want to utilize that character as much as possible. In fact, you can see him in little cameos in Idiots and Angels and also the Kanye West music video. He has a little cameo in that also. I like to sneak him into films at certain times.

Do you do much commercial work these days?

Occasionally I do some commercials. I work on some documentaries. I?m working on some trailers for some film festivals. So yeah, I do occasional work outside of my own film work. It?s a good way to supplement my income.

So why aren?t there more Bill Plymptons out there?

There are a few. Don Hertzfeldt is very successful as an independent. He does well. A couple of my friends in New York here, they?re independent, strictly independent. More and more people are realizing that you can make a living doing short films and showing them to various places around the world. I think it?s starting to change. There is now a growing market for short films.

Are there too few people who can draw, who can animate and are willing to put in the man-hours?

It?s not the man-hours, it?s the sense of humor. I think that?s the main thing. Most of these markets, these stations and DVDs, they want funny films. There?s a lot of wonderful short films out there, but they?re not funny. They?re serious, they?re artistic, they?re political. But those are really difficult to sell. Whereas a funny film, that makes people laugh, everybody wants to buy it. So I think the two main criteria for a successful short film are that it?s funny and that it?s well-made.
One of the problems with spending a lot of time on your film?because it can take a year to make it?is that it becomes so expensive, because you spend so much time on it, that you?ll never make a profit. The secret for me is to make the film in a month or two and then continue to work on other projects. That way I can make a profit.

So it?s a juggling act?

Yeah. Well, I have three rules, Plympton?s dogma. The three rules are: 1.) Make your film short, under five minutes, 2.) Make it cheap, under a thousand dollars a minute, and 3.) Make it funny. If you can meet all three of those criteria then you will be a success. You?re film will make a lot of money.

Were more people successfully following these rules during the Golden Age of the animated short?

No, they weren?t. The big studios?you had Warner Brothers and Fleischer Brothers and Disney?those films never really made money. They were financed by the big studios, and they were expensive to make. They were very expensive to make. Even UPA, I think, kind of disappeared because their films weren?t making a profit. Because they spent a lot of money on those films. But the reason, I?ve succeeded is because I do so many of the things myself. I do the backgrounds, the stories, I produce, I write, I animate, I layout, I do the storyboards. Since I do so many parts of it, the films aren?t very expensive.