One of the most easily recognisable auteurs working in animation, Bill Plympton has produced a succession of animated features and shorts which delight with their unique style and idiosyncratic world view. His is a bizarre world which, unusually for such hand drawn work, normally assumes the presence of an adult audience and where the exaggerations of sex can be sniggered over for all the right reasons. HAIR HIGH is no exception, and continues the animator's regular obsessions with the strained relationships between sexually optimistic men and women, detailed with black humour all the while laced with some side swipes at the ironies of romance. There's also plenty of hair spray, horny chickens, a good soundtrack, smoking, and the genital stimulation of frogs. Rudeness, surreality and extremes of physical contortion appear again as part and parcel of the plymptonesque world - which this time includes nods to such disparate films as REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, NIGHT OF THE HUNTER and THE CASTLE OF CAGLIOSTRO. HAIR HIGH is voiced by such talent as Keith and David Carradine, Ed Begley Jnr and Matt Groening. Ostensibly a moralistic tale of 50's high school love that ends in comi-tragedy, HAIR HIGH actually engages as a characteristic free wheeling fantasy, allowing the animator to indulge in all sorts of off the wall scenes and images propelling the narrative forward. For those better used to the tight pencil work and plot construction of more regularly exposed animation studios Plympton's work, which leaps more immediately from the artist's bizarre subconscious, often comes as a wake up call. In its attempt to drag cartoons out of the juvenile closet Plympton's longer work has been blazing a trail for years. With not a cuddly, wise-cracking animal in sight and a hands-off view with regards to any computer generated figures, HAIR HIGH is a must for admirers of Plympton. Since this film Plympton has completed two other features, including SHUT EYE HOTEL and, most intriguingly, TOKYO ONLYMPIC, which at 137 mins is slated at his longest yet, double that of the present title.
Review of Hair High
