An admirable effort, but difficult to follow

It is cheering that an alternative to computer animation and the hard, puffy, shiny look of Pixar exists and is recognized. Just because it is that, many drawings done by a single man, Cheatin', Bill Plympton's new hand drawn animated feature, is great stuff. But even though Dennis Harvey, writing in Variety, calls Cheatin' "an energetic romp" and "one of Bill Plympton's best longform animated works," he also notes in that same lead paragraph that "like most of his efforts," this film "has a bit of trouble sustaining full interest even over a relatively limited runtime." This is true, and seventy-five minutes is a pretty long "relatively limited runtime" not to have one's interest fully sustained over.

Originally animated cartoons were very short (and could seem repetitious just the same). Since the feature-length ones arrived, numerous though they are, few ever achieve the classic status of the first Disney ones. Cheatin's trouble sustaining interest comes because Plympton's narrative is a little opaque, and a lot thin. A major cause of the opacity is the total lack of dialogue. Films can survive brilliantly on very little dialogue, but that's a different matter. Even silent films had title cards. This doesn't.

Some people are much better at reading wordless signs, and they have my admiration. I'm ashamed to be active as a visual artist and yet to have found Marcel Marceau's celebrated mime routines so close to incomprehensible -- except for the fluttering hand symbolizing a caught butterfly. That one, I got. Likewise apart from seeing there was sex and drugs and violence going on in the new Ukrainian movie The Tribe, the wordless doings of the young deaf people frantically signing, presented without subtitles, meant little to me (and mattered less).

With these warnings in mind I can still elucidate Cheatin's suject matter well enough. It's about love, betrayal, and jealousy. The flossy female protagonist, Ella, meets up with Jake in a bumper car coilision, and they become a passionate couple-- forever, till the romance ends when at his gas station job (where female customers all seem to have the hots for him),a schemin' other woman comes to arouse Jake's jealousy by showing him a photo that makes it look like Ella's been undressing in a room full of naked men. Actually, they're just mannequins in a storeroom where she was trying on a dress. Enraged, Jake begins getting revenge by being massively unfaithful in a string of motel trysts. Discovering this, and eager for her own more justified revenge, at first Ella tries without success to hire a hit man to off Jake. What happens when she seeks further redress is harder to follow, though it apparently involves a "disgraced magician and his forbidden 'soul machine" -- am I beginning to lose you? I'm beginning to lose myself. The visual clues become tricky, because using the magician's machine, Ella becomes able to assume the form of Jake's other lovers, in order to make things right, apparently, through a complicated series of real or mimicked wrongs.

Whatever. Hand drawn animation is a visual pleasure in itself, one that is the more satisfying after so much machine-made stuff. The images are soft, have the look of pencil (with computer-overlaid soft color tints imitating watercolor washes) , and they flicker and flutter in a way you can't fake with gadgetry. (Except where you can, as with partially computer-executed rotoscoping.) There is pleasure in grotesquerie, the elongated bodies, Jake's tiny waist, the way figures loom and sway. Plympton injects a surprising amount of passion and eroticism in this film, and surreal, expressionistic flights of visual invention. He loves to play with an idea, like bumper cars, teeth, or eyes, spreading water, the danger of loose high tension wires, sheets blowing loose in the wind, a woman's features bouncing apart, then reassembling. This is where Plympton most excels and enterrtains.

As with many animations, more so the truly independent, individually crafted ones like this, plot, gets periodically tangled or even abandoned along the way. Cheatin' is more like musical composition than storytelling, a framework on which Plympton can hang his flights of visual fancy. The sometimes loose, or stretched, narrative thread is bound together by the strange sometimes beautiful soundtrack, the sighs and grunts and snorts, munches and crunches, taps and peeps and creaking bedsprings that take the place of words, along with an elaborate, intense and swooning score composed by Nicole Renaud and augmented by interpolated classical passages from Ravel, Verdi, and others.

But ultimately, after all due respect has been paid to Plympton's individuality and visual invention and his faithfulness to his style, let's admit that there are animations that tell much better, more coherent stories than this, with richer images as well. Maybe with a pulpy, noirish storyline like this, Plympton should have stuck closer to traditions of narrative and image.

Cheatin', 76 mins., the filmmaker's seventh animated feature debuted at Sitges - Festival Internacional De Cinema Fantastic De Catalunya in October 2013, continuing at specialized festivals through 2014. Theatrical debuts 23 April 2014 in France and 3 April 2015 in Mexico and New York. Good reviews in France (AlloCiné press rating 3.8) and the US (Metacritic score 73%).

Opens 17 April 2015 at the Roxie Theater in San Francisco and Rialto Cinemas Elmwood in Berkeley.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.