Indy Film Fest: Slide
Animation legend Bill Plympton is back with this imaginative hand-drawn feature about a mysterious guitar player battling rapacious land developers and Hollywood moguls.
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Fast-paced, absurdist and not a little puckish, “Slide” is part Western, part musical and part eco-fable. It stars a mysterious guitar player and a local prostitute who team up to take on evil land developers and Hollywood moguls.
It’s directed and co-written (with Jim Lujan) by Bill Plympton, a legend in the animation community, most known for his wacky, absurdist shorts and bent sense of humor. He’s twice been nominated for the Academy Award for animated shorts and is probably best known for the recurring canine character from “Guard Dog.”
Backed with a Kickstarter, “Slide” is at once very basic in its animation style and quite dazzling. It’s got a very deliberately “drawn” look to it, so you can totally see the lines and strokes of the artists. The action lacks the smoothness of computer generated animation, with a more herky-jerky feel and jumpy quality. Sometimes they’ll even re-use a particular bit of animation several times.
Overall, it looks like something an extremely talented and dedicated student did themselves over the course of their entire college career. That’s a compliment.
Slide (voice by Daniel Kaufman, though he doesn’t speak very much) is an Old West style antihero whose horse is killed when they’re swept into a whirlpool. His guitar is broken, but he carves himself a new one in a jiff, and eventually wanders into the pioneer town of Sourdough Creek.
The time setting isn’t stated overtly but I’d guess 1930s. Out here, it’s still roughneck country, where isolated miners, lumberjacks and the like gather at the Lucky Buck Saloon for some music, drinking and whoring. Delilah (Maureen McElheron) is one of the regulars tipping onto her back to be slobbered over by snaggly toothed men, and occasionally they’ll let her warble a tune.
Jeb Carver (Lujan) is the mayor and owner of most every business in town, supported by the lickspittle Sheriff Sam and his bean-counter brother. He gets a call from Hollywood looking for a cheap place with mountains, forest and water to shoot the studio’s latest film, “So Close to Ecstasy.”
Jeb lies about Sourdough Creek’s assets in order to land the shoot, then sets everybody to work building what he promised, including a dam and a grand hotel, which he dubs Monte Carlo del Norte. If a few workers need to get killed or shot while it’s constructed, not to mention whole ecosystems cleared, then that’s what it’ll be.
Slide and Delilah soon set up resisting the whole effort, though it takes Jeb a while to put it together that the bandito in the long duster and the guy playing guitar on his stage at the Lucky Buck are the same person. The rebels also get a hand from Rosalita (Ana Sophia Colón), who runs the nearby fishing village impacted by all the construction.
Things turn into the expected series of hijinks, over-the-top violence and madcap encounters. The movie moves so fast, if you blink twice in a row you might miss something.
It’s definitely not for the kiddies, as the depictions of the earthly delights people partake in are shown without much obfuscation. For instance, at one point Deliliah and the other prostitutes are outfitted with Sugar Shakers, little strap-on motorized devices that cause their top assets to jiggle in a fetching way.
In the middle of the conflict, the arrival of the much-feared Hellbug, a massive chitinous creature, throws everything for a loop, as nobody is sure who’s side he’s on, if anybody’s.
McElheron also provided the music and a few songs for the film, including Slide’s signature haunting riff.
“Slide” looks low-tech, because it is. In a lot of ways it’s a throwback to the days of animation from a hundred years ago, with each actor providing the voices of several characters and the animators dashing off their drawings at breakneck speed. I admired its simple purity and daffy humor.