“I really wanted to be a cowboy,” Bill Plympton tells me from his studio in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood.  “In the ’50s, I was bitten like a lot of other kids with the bug of being a cowboy.”

The 78-year-old animation director has spent four decades working against the grain of the industry, self-financing his films and drawing each frame with pencil and paper. His art skews surreal, humorous, often dark, and very adult.

Along the way he’s been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film (1988’s Your Face and 2004’s Guard Dog), taking home a Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival for 1991’s Push Comes to Shove.

Now he’s traveling back west, bringing along his latest animated feature Slide, which will have its Oregon premiere Thursday, Aug. 22, at the Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation and Technology, with a reception following the screening at which Plympton will sign autographs and offer drawings. And this visit has him sounding unusually wistful.

“I grew up in the timberland of Estacada, outside of Oregon City,” he tells me, “so I have a lot of experience with lumber towns and lumber trucks and guys who had chopped down trees and everything.”

“I was sort of a cultural misfit because I’m so far out the woods that I didn’t get to art galleries or museums or movies or like that until I was much older.  So I was watching TV.  That’s where I got all my culture, on television. I fell in love with Walt Disney cartoons in a very young age, like three or four.  And they were very funny, especially the Goofy ones. I love Goofy. And I remember my dad, who was a banker. He was always the center of attention in a party. He could tell these jokes and make everybody laugh. And I said, God, I wish I could do that. You know, I’m terrible at telling jokes. But I can draw jokes. And so I figured, oh well, I’ll do my laughter out of my cartoons. And so at a very early age I knew I wanted to make cartoons that made people laugh.”

Bill’s first job was in a local grocery store, where the lumberjacks who came in for supplies bore little resemblance to Walt Disney’s Paul Bunyan or Fess Parker’s Davy Crockett.  “They would come in, but I never hung out with them. So I wanted to make a cowboy film, a western about that lifestyle.”

Slide has been Bill’s main project for several years now.  A Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign was successfully backed in 2020, and he had planned on finishing the film by 2022.  But by the time the preeminent Annecy International Animation Festival arrived in June of 2024, Slide was still a work in progress.

“It was kind of a sticky situation because I had to get up there and apologize. It was supposed to be a competition and they were supposed to judge on it. But they couldn’t because it wasn’t a finished film.”

When push comes to shove, Bill Plympton is a one-man operation.  His staff includes the occasional young producer and office manager, but the buck stops with the guy at the drawing table, as it has since the 1980s.

Occasionally Bill will entrust another artist with coloring his drawings, but each and every element of a Plympton film, from the characters to the backgrounds, is plotted out and drawn by hand by Bill. And nothing else looks like a Plympton film. His characters alternate between sinewy and voluptuous. The anatomy of the people and even the buildings and trees seem at once familiar and impossible, bouncing and twisting and extruding around the frame.

In his books Independently Animated and Make Toons That Sell Without Selling Out, Bill preaches the gospel of self-financing. The central tenet is something he calls “Plympton’s Dogma”:

“There are three rules for success in making short films. Number one is, make a film short: five minutes or less. Number two is, make the film cheap: $1,000 per minute. Something like that. And number three is, make the film funny. And if you can answer all three of these criteria, I think the film will be a success.  You can continue making films independently. And it’s not that hard. You don’t have to be a great brilliant artist. I mean, Don [World of Tomorrow] Hertzfeldt is not a brilliant artist. He does stick-figure animation, for crying out loud. But they are funny, and they are very watchable.”

Looking back on Bill Plympton’s filmography of eight animated features, four live-action features, and dozens of shorts, it’s hard to believe that he had once despaired of being an animator. But studio animation had gone into a slump in the 1960s. Warner Brothers’ famed Termite Terrace cartoon department shut its doors in 1964, and even Disney animation seemed on the verge of fading out in the wake of Walt’s death in 1966.

“When I graduated from high school,’ Bill tells me, ”there were no animation schools. This was before CalArts. And nobody was really dealing with animation. Nobody thought animation had a future. The only thing that they had then was Hanna Barbara. And I thought, that was crap. It’s not animation to me. That’s like voices and mouths moving. It seems like a waste.”

After graduating from Oregon City High School in 1964, Bill studied graphic design at Portland State University. PSU at the time was a hotbed of innovation. One of his drawing teachers was the celebrated Mel Katz, a founder of the Portland Center for the Visual Arts. “Mel Katz was a big influence,” Bill recalls. “He really changed my whole style through his drawing classes.”

Bill also drew cartoons for the student newspaper and designed posters for the PSU Film Committee, working alongside Bob Summers, who soon went on to co-found the Northwest Film Center (now the Portland Art Museum’s PAM Cut) with Brooke Jacobson.

And then Bill joined the staff of the yearbook. “And it was a really big year for the yearbook because it got an article in The New York Times about it.  It was very scandalous that they had a full-color nude spread. And people were shocked about that. I did not make the decision of showing a nude artists’ model. But I thought it was kind of nice; I liked it.”

While still at PSU, Bill started weighing his career options. Animation still seemed like a pipe dream, so he doubled down on illustration, shopping his portfolio around to local newspapers.

“I actually did one cartoon for The Oregonian. It was a caricature, I forget who it was. And they loved it.  So they hired me to do a whole spread of political cartoons, all of the people running for Congress in Oregon, all of the people running for governor and all that stuff. And it was a big hit. I mean, my folks couldn’t believe I did this whole page of caricatures. So I was a golden boy as far as The Oregonian was concerned. And that’s a good thing, because my folks never thought I’d make it as a cartoonist, and they were excited that I did so well at The Oregonian.”

“And then I got a phone call from the managing editor. He wanted to do a huge article about nuclear energy, how cool it is. And of course, these were the days when nuclear energy was really scary. That was the year Three Mile Island happened, I think. And I said, ‘I really love working for The Oregonian, but on this one I’ll have to pass.’ And man, he freaked out. He thought he owned me, I guess, and he banned me. I was blackballed, and I never worked for The Oregonian again.”

It was during this time, in the mid-1960s, that Bill encountered Walt Curtis, the iconoclastic poet and novelist who died last summer at the age of 82. Walt was also an Oregon City native.

“Well, he grew up about a mile from me,” Bill said. “I didn’t know that at the time. He went to the same high school. And then when I went to Portland State, that’s where I really ran into him and fell in love with his poems. And I’d go and watch him perform at the Euphoria, whatever club that he was performing in.”

The two became fast friends: “As a poet, Walt Curtis is very similar to me as an animator. He’s very outrageous, he’s funny, he’s creative, he’s independent, and he’s raunchy.”

Decades later, their friendship would lead to a documentary film directed by Bill. Called Walt Curtis: The Peckerneck Poet, it can be found as an extra on the DVD of Gus Van Sant’s first feature film, Mala Noche (itself based on Walt Curtis’s novel of the same name).

Peckerneck Poet was a freewheeling romp. “I’m driving around to certain Portland locations and having him read a poem,” Bill recalls, “It was a total joy. It was like a party every day.”

In 1967, by happenstance, Bill cemented another lifelong friendship while attending the short-lived Portland International Animation Festival. “I went there and I saw these industrials, he tells me. “I don’t know if they’re still making industrials. They’re long ads, like 20-minute ads, for Evinrude Motors or White Stag or Jantzen, something like that. And they were hilarious. They were like Monty Python in advertising; the humor was really dry. The filmmaker was there, and I came up to him sheepishly and said, ‘Man, your stuff is great, you’re so funny. I wish I could do that in animation.’ And he said, ‘Well, I have more up at my house. Why don’t you come follow me, I’ll show you some more of my films.’”

“So I went up there and I came to the door. I saw this 14-year-old kid laying on the floor, doing cartoons.  And I went, ‘Wow, those are really funny, you’ve got a good sense of humor. You may go somewhere, kid.’  And it turned out that the filmmaker was Homer Groening, of course, and his young son was Matt.”

“We’ve been friends ever since. And in fact — I think it was about 15 years ago — we were at Annecy together, this mystical, beautiful animation festival in France. And we were out on a boat, at the middle of this beautiful lake, drinking wine, eating baguettes, and sort of just, you know, getting stoned, getting high. And he said, ‘You know, Bill, you should do something for The Simpsons.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding?  I would love to do something for The Simpsons.’ And so he said, ‘Why don’t you do a couch gag?’ I said, ‘Yeah, show me what I need to do,’ and we did it.” 

All in all, Bill animated half a dozen Couch Gag openers for episodes of The Simpsons, including a variation on his breakout short film Your Face.

Despite the cultural ferment happening in Portland, Bill felt hemmed in, so in 1968 he transferred from Portland State to New York’s School of Visual Arts. His dream of becoming an animator had never completely subsided, and in fact he had been dazzled that year by the release of the George Dunning feature Yellow Submarine.

“When I went to the School of Visual Arts, I wanted to learn animation. I wanted to know how to put a film together, because I didn’t know how to do that. And the animation teacher knew nothing about it. He didn’t care about storytelling or narrative, or even beautiful drawing. He just wanted to do something experimental, and that left me out. I wanted to tell stories and make people laugh.”

Disillusioned, Bill dropped out of SVA and once again shopped his illustration portfolio around town. “I didn’t need to go to school anymore. So I quit and started selling myself. I was in The New York Times, New Yorker, other men’s magazines — Playboy, Penthouse, Oui.”

Manhattan itself was an inspiration to him: “It was really so exciting, I would just walk down the street to get a million ideas for cartoons. Everybody was tripping. Everybody was doing psychedelics, rock clubs were really popular, music was everywhere, and fashion was so bizarre.”

Eventually, Bill launched a weekly political comic called Plympton in the Soho Weekly News, but animation was still never far from his thoughts. “I did a newspaper comic strip that was in about twenty papers. It was how I learned to draw fast. And when you’re doing animation, hundreds of drawings a day, you have to be able to draw fast and get a nice style. And I learned how to come up with funny ideas.  And so the syndicated strip was actually a nice segue into animation, which I started around 1984 with a film called Boomtown.”

Boomtown was the brainchild of legendary cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer — a concept for an eight-minute film about the dramatic increase in defense spending during the Reagan administration. Bill was brought aboard the project despite his conspicuous inexperience in filmmaking.

“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know how to make an animated film. I’ve never learned that.’  [Feiffer] said, ‘Don’t worry. We’ll hire someone to walk you through all the steps to make an animated film.’ Her name was Connie D’Antuono. So this became my animation school. Even though I got paid nothing for working on this film, I really felt that I was learning how to make an animated film.”

“And after that, Boomtown was quite a success. It won a bunch of prizes and played in about a hundred cinemas all over America. But the important thing for me was, I knew how to make a film. And that’s when I made Your Face. And that’s what started my whole career.”

For his first solo film, Bill leaned hard into surrealism.  He drew a slickly-dressed crooner character singing into the camera, and then started squeezing the man’s facial features in increasingly bizarre ways. “I was dueling around with the guy’s head, and just kind of deforming it — how many ways I could screw up so this guy’s head. And as an experiment, I made a film out of it.

“And I remember the first time I screened it. This was in New York; there was a competition for animation and I entered it. And all these big name animators from New York were in the audience. I was nervous as hell because I was a nobody. I’d never made a film before, and this is kind of a goofball film. And as soon as they started to show it, everybody laughed. The whole place broke into laughter. And I went, ‘Oh my God, this is what it’s like.’ I practically levitated, I was so excited. I was just in heaven to hear all that laughter, because throughout my whole career, if anybody laughed at my cartoons it was at home. They were reading magazines or newspapers, and I never heard people respond. So to hear that huge audience reaction just really opened my eyes as to the possibilities of animation.”

Your Face became a sensation at film festivals. And even before it earned an Oscar nomination, Bill was planning a career leap. “I called up all my newspapers and magazines and I said, ‘I’m quitting print.  I’m going into animation,’ and they laughed at me. And I said, ‘No, I think I can make it.’ They said, ‘You’ll be back. You’ll never make it in animation. It’s dead. Nobody does animation.”

Bill’s single collaborator on Your Face was his composer friend Maureen McElheron, who shared his appreciation for county and western music. “Yeah, Maureen and I go way back to the early ‘70s. We met at a bar through another friend, and she had a band. She asked me to join it and play pedal steel guitar.”

Bill and Maureen’s friendship grew into a partnership that continued over most of Bill’s films, right up to the present day and the soundtrack to Slide. “I fell in love with her songwriting and her style of music,” Bill recalls. “I grew up with country western, you know, from Clackamas County — the rural woods. My dad listened to Hank Williams a lot, so there’s a lot of Hank Williams in this film. We can’t afford to buy the music, of course, so our band with Maureen and Hank Bones are going to mimic the old Hank Williams style — you know, really crude rough honky-tonk.”

Bill returned to New York after attending the 1987 Academy Awards ceremony and started looking for ways to finance future projects. “The commercials started coming in. ‘Oh, you got nominated for an Oscar. You know, we want you to do a commercial for us.’ I did Geico spots and Trivial Pursuit and Pictionary and a bunch of companies that wanted to use my style to sell their products.” 

Bill’s stable of commercial clients expanded to include United Airlines, Microsoft, and Taco Bell, among others, but it was that first client that transformed his relationship with his parents. “One good thing about the Geico spots was my folks who, you know, went through the Depression and World War II — two very, very bad events — when I told them I want to be a cartoonist, they said, ‘Don’t be a cartoonist, you know, you’ll never go anywhere.  You’ll be living in a garret without any food to eat.’ 

“And even though my films were showing in cinemas and I was winning a lot of prizes, they still didn’t believe that I was going to succeed. And then we were on vacation and watching TV and one of my Geico spots came on and they looked at it. ‘Is that you?  You did that.’ And all of a sudden they accepted it. They said, ‘Oh, yeah, you can be a cartoonist and make money because you’re doing commercials on TV.’”

The late 1980s was the beginning of a new golden age for American animation, and Bill was at the forefront. “The Little Mermaid was a big hit. [Who Framed] Roger Rabbit came out about that time. And also, you had MTV showing a lot of animation. A lot of music videos were animated. All of a sudden, animation was really the cool thing to do. And so I was part of that movement. At one point, I was sort of the animation guy for MTV. And it’s interesting because they never used my name. They would show my films. They would show 25 Ways to Quit Smoking, and they cut off my name. And so I heard from other people that I was known as ‘Colored Pencil Guy.’ They would be watching MTV: ‘Oh, Colored Pencil Guy’s on again.’ And so I became famous for MTV, but nobody knew my name. It was kind of weird.”

Bill’s name gained a little more traction when his short film Push Comes to Shove was entered into competition at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival. “You know, that’s a funny story,” he says. “I was right in the middle of doing a feature film — J Lyle, a live-action film. And they said, Oh, you’ve got to go to Cannes.’  I said, ‘I can’t, the film’s already in production.’ I didn’t know I was going to get in [to competition], you know. And so after a long day of shooting, I was really tired and I turned on the TV at home. Sure enough, they had the closing ceremonies of the Cannes Festival, and Madonna gets on stage: ‘And the winner is Bill Plympton, for Push Comes to Shove.’ And I go, ‘What?’ And Madonna wants to give me a hug, to give me a prize. So, that’s the way it is in independent filmmaking sometimes.”

Push Comes to Shove found an international audience thanks in part to its reliance on expression and action over dialogue. Many of Bill’s short films are dialogue-free, a trait he credits to his love of early cinema.

“Well, you know, up until 1927, all Hollywood films were silent,” he says. “And that was a real art form — telling stories with minimal or no dialogue with just little sentences. And I love a lot of those old silent films, the Buster Keaton stuff and the Charlie Chaplin stuff. The tricky part about this is you really have to know your chops as an animator. Because if you don’t absolutely nail the actions, expressions, the progression of events, nobody’s going to know what’s going on. If you look at my print cartoons, I had no dialogue in Playboy and Penthouse, which is visual storytelling. So for me, it’s not that big of a leap.”

The 1980s and ’90s were a boom time for touring festivals. Spike and Mike’s Festival of Animation and The Tournee of Animation were soon joined by Mike Judge and Don Hertzfeldt’s Animation Show and Ron Diamond’s Animation Show of Shows. “That gave a lot of people their starts,” notes Bill, “people like Henry [Coraline] Selick. A lot of people who were independent animators worked for Spike and Mike and people like that. It was a really exciting time to get involved with animation.”

Bill Plympton’s live-action “Guns on the Clackamas” and animated “Idiots & Angels.”

Between festival prize money, video rentals and sales, and income from commercial work, Bill was able to keep his studio humming. Unlike many animators, he never applied for grants. “I don’t believe in taking government money, or corporate money, or studio money,” he said. “I just think it warps your freedom and your independence. I want to make the films I want to make. I don’t want to make them for any kind of panel or bureaucracy.”

In some ways Bill’s independence felt accidental. “I never wanted to be an independent filmmaker when I started doing animation,” he says. “I always thought I’d be a Disney animator or something like that. But things just didn’t work out. And so I started doing these feature films.”

Ironically, it was while Bill was working on his first feature, The Tune, that The House of Mouse came calling. The talent scouts at Disney had taken note of the 1987 Oscar nomination for Your Face.

“They called me up and they said, ‘We’re sending a lawyer to your studio in New York. He’ll be there next week.’  So he knocks on my door, he comes in, he’s got a nice suit and tie and a big briefcase, sits down, opens up the briefcase — big contract. I go, ‘Whoa!’  He said, ‘Walt Disney Studios wants to offer you a million bucks to come work for us.’ I go, ‘Holy cow! Finally they see my talent, my skill. I can be an animator for Disney. This is my lifelong dream, this is what I’ve wanted to do.’”

“And then I said, ‘Well you know, I love doing these little short films. Can I still do the short films on the weekend?’ He said, ‘Yeah, you could do those but Disney will own those.’ I said, ‘What if I tell someone a funny joke?’ ‘Well, that’s Disney’s.’ ‘What if I have a dream?’ ‘Well, that’s ours, and that’s the way we work.’ And you know what, that’s fine. A lot of people don’t mind just dedicating 100% of their lives to working for Disney. That’s their dream, just like it was mine. But at this point I was doing [my short films] 25 Ways To Quit Smoking and How To Kiss and I was enjoying it and they were getting a lot of publicity and sales. So I said ‘No.’”

“Maybe that was the stupidest move of my life. I could be having a nice house out in L.A., driving a fancy car and everything. I only found out later from some of the guys that worked there that they wanted me on Aladdin. You know, the Robin Williams Genie that does all this crazy stuff. Because I was good at transforming the head, like in Your Face. They wanted me to do some of that with the Genie.

“But, I had the studio in New York. I had people that I’d have to fire and I’d have to shut down the whole operation. And I really liked The Tune. I thought The Tune was going to be a really cool film, so I said ‘No.’ And I say if you want to work for Disney, go ahead. It’s a great opportunity. I’m always the first in line to see a Disney or Pixar film, because they’re really wonderful. But every morning when I get up and I go to my drawing board and I start drawing and there’s no one looking over my shoulder saying, ‘We don’t like that; change it, please,’ I say I can draw whatever I want, and to me that’s worth more than a million bucks.”

But even the most independent filmmakers have to worry about distribution, and things were no different once Bill moved into feature films. “I did a film called I Married a Strange Person, he tells me, “which is probably my most outrageous film. And probably my most successful film. But anyway, it was in Sundance [Film Festival].  And I went there to try and find a buyer. And the people in the audience loved the film. They were applauding and laughing and standing up and everything. And so I thought, ‘Oh, we’ve got a sure hit.’ But nobody really picked it up, because it was such an odd film. They didn’t think there was a market for adult animation.” 

He rolls his eyes.  “You know, animation’s for kids, after all. So I was really having a hard time making a deal on it. And I was riding the bus at Sundance, and I saw the head of Lion’s Gate Films at the front of the bus. And I said, ‘I’m Bill Plympton. I’ve got this new film called I Married a Strange Person. You’ve got to see it, people really love it.’ He said, ‘Well, you know, I’ve got a stack of films to see. I just don’t think I’ll have time to see it.’ I went, ‘Oh boy.’”

“And then this snowboarder jumped on the bus, snow and water dripping down his face. And he had his board with him. And he says, “You’re Bill Plympton! You made I Married a Strange Person. Dude, that film rocked!’  And he jumped off the bus and went down the hill. And so the guy from Lion’s Gate looks at me and says, ‘Wow. I guess I’ve got to see this film.’ Because of that stupid snowboarder guy. I mean, I don’t know where the hell he came from. And I wish I’d planned it that way, because it just worked like genius.  And so he saw the film, he loved it, and he bought it for a good chunk of money. And I even got royalty checks, which, if you know independent film business, you never get royalty checks. So that’s the way the industry works. Some sort of fluke, some sort of connection, some sort of writeup or review will make your film a big success. And I was lucky. I got that snowboarder guy to help me out.”

The rise of the internet and the fragmentation of home entertainment changed things for independent animators. Corporations cut their advertising budgets, which had been a prime source of income for Bill.  “I’ve still been doing a few commercials,” Bill told me. “I just finished a Nike ad, but the pay was a lot less than it usually is. And I’m working on some documentaries, and that pays pretty well. But right now, we’re selling our original artwork. And that’s becoming a real surprising source of income for us. Because the stuff I did for The Simpsons, Your Face, How to Kiss, 25 Ways to Quit Smoking — those films are really popular with a lot of people. They grew up with them on MTV.”

Bill Plympton’s animation breakthroughs “Hair High” and “Your Face.”

Like so many other creative people, Bill also turned to crowdfunding, which has largely financed the production of his recent features. Distribution still remains a sticking point, though. So when Bill began working on the concept that would become the 2004 feature Hair High, his cousin Martha Plimpton, the stage and screen actress, tried to help him out. 

“We met at family reunions and things. And we’re having drinks and I said, ‘You know, Martha, my films never really get a very good distribution. There’s no star power involved in the films.’  She said, ‘Well, you know what?  Let me make a few phone calls.’ So she called all of her buddies, people she’s worked with in the past, and said, ‘You want to be in a Bill Plympton film.’ And they all said, ‘Yeah, wow, Bill Plympton.’  How cool is that? And they took scale.”

“We got David Carradine, Keith Carradine, Beverly D’Angelo, Dermot Mulroney, Sarah Silverman, Matt Groening, who rarely does voices for animation, and Don Hertzfeldt. Hair High was this big budget film, it was almost half a million dollars. For me, that’s a lot of money. We really spent a lot of money on the coloring and the camera work and the music and everything. But the film just ran out of money.  And the ending — which was supposed to be really powerful and long and strong — I ran out of money so I wasn’t able to finish it. So that was another disappointment. I should do it now, you know, now that I make more money — a director’s cut.”

As with many of Bill’s films, the bawdy humor in Hair High might have limited its audience. The setting for the story was based on his own memories of 1960s rural high school life, but he couldn’t resist pushing the limits of what people expect from an animated film.

“I made up my own high school myths and put those in there. For example, there’s a scene in the film, the high school football game. And the mascot, who’s a chicken — they call them the Cocks — takes too much Spanish Fly, but I call it Tijuana Tonic. And he takes too much because he’s so nervous about asking this girl out for a date. What happens is he’s got this huge hard-on, like a four foot long hard-on, and the chicken mascot goes crazy and starts chasing the cheerleaders down the field. And it starts having wild sex with all the cheerleaders and the band members and the referees and the other mascots. And this was inspired by a story that someone told me. He worked on a stud farm, and they accidentally gave one of the horses too much of an aphrodisiac, apparently. And the horse broke out of the barn and the last they saw it was humping a Volkswagen. And so I thought, what a great idea.  I want to use that in my film.”

Bill’s upbringing in rural Oregon continued to spark new ideas. “I made another film out there called Guns on the Clackamas.  And that was a live action film, a mockumentary.” he says. “And we brought horses and cowboys down there, and wagon trains, all sorts of Western paraphernalia. And we spent a lot of time shooting on the Clackamas River. When the day’s shooting was done, we’d sit around the campfire, drink beer, and go swimming naked. So it was a real Oregon experience.”

Bill’s new animated feature Slide, like Hair High, should never be confused with a Disney or Pixar property. “It’s not for kids,” he warns me. “It’s very different than any other kind of western you’ve ever seen. It’s very, very bizarre, very twisted.  It has a lot of violence in it. There’s a lot of hookers in there, and animated sex.”

The fictional town of Sourdough Creek in Slide is inspired in part by the Estacada of Bill’s youth. Like so many of Bill’s stories, though, it stretches everything to the extreme. “This film is sort of a blend of the timberland kind of atmosphere and the cowboy. So it’s kind of like a Clint Eastwood film. This stranger comes into town. You’re not sure whether he’s real or he’s just someone’s imagination.”

Sourdough Creek is run by a corrupt mayor and his brother, who are tangled up in the murder of innocent people. “And so this guy — Slide is his name because he plays slide guitar — comes into town and cleans up the town not with violence, but with music. It’s the music that solves the problem of corruption. There’s probably more bad guys in this film than any other film in Hollywood history, because I love drawing bad guys. I love drawing the eye patches and the scars on the face and the missing ears and the beards and all that crazy stuff.”

Between the festival circuit and regular visits back to Oregon, Bill used to keep a busy travel schedule, but family responsibilities and the lingering impacts of the Covid pandemic have largely kept him in New York. He’s working on changing that. Lately he’s been appearing onstage with fellow animation director Signe Baumane, whose very personal feature My Love Affair with Marriage has been a hit with audiences and critics. And he looks for any opportunity to share the stage with Portland animator and old friend Joanna Priestley.

In 2012, the City of Portland declared May 26 “Bill Plympton Day,” with a street party taking place on Hawthorne Boulevard and screenings of Alexia Anastasio’s documentary Adventures in Plymptoons! taking place inside the Bagdad Theater.

In keeping with its subject, Adventures in Plymptoons! was not a film for young audiences. “I do want to warn people,” Bill told audiences at the time, “that there is a shot of me naked in the mud.”

The film is packed with guest appearances, from filmmakers Terry Gilliam and Lloyd Kaufman to musicians Moby and “Weird Al” Yankovic, actors Ed Begley Jr. and Matthew Modine, animators Ralph Bakshi and Will Vinton. The celebrities talk not just about the explosive laughter that accompanies the screening of any Plympton film, but also the relatability — the appreciation for the quirks and the deep humanity of the characters.

“It was really community-made,” director Anastasio said of the documentary, “Everybody came in … and that’s what shines through the most.”

Pointing out the retired porn star Ron Jeremy, who co-owned the adult venue Club Sesso, Bill noted, “Ron Jeremy is in there, and although you don’t see anything, stuff is implied, so you can use your imagination.”

And indeed, old friends remember running into Bill at Club Sesso during his Portland visits back in the 2000s, as he happily sketched portraits of any women who wanted to pose for him.

Several of Bill’s Portland friends, Walt Curtis included, were surprised when he became a family man, marrying Sandrine Flament in 2011 and welcoming son Lucas into the household less than a year later.

And the friends who remain in Oregon occasionally wonder about young Lucas growing up in the canyons of Manhattan, where the nearby river is a highway swollen with ferries and freighters, not a byway for salmon and herons, inflatable rafts and inner tubes.

I remind Bill about a summer day in Oregon City in 2006. He had flown in from New York in the wake of his father’s death. A band of artists, poets, and old friends assembled to pay their respects to Bill’s mom before heading to the riverbank to grill burgers and drink wine.

A few minutes into the gathering, the booming voice of Walt Curtis cut through the crowd. Walt herded us all into the river, an irregular circle of people standing up to their knees in the water. Everybody hold hands, he bellowed, as the occasional inner-tube rider wound around us, following the flow of the Clackamas down to its convergence with the Willamette.

Walt launched into an impromptu poetic tribute to Don Plympton — the neighbor he knew for decades — and the awkwardness between us gave way to rapt silence.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” Bill remembers, “like a very hippy-dippy kind of thing to do on the rocks of the Clackamas River. But actually, once he got into it, I was crushed. My heart was broken.”

“I loved my dad.  He was a big inspiration in terms of my sense of humor, and I missed him a lot. So it was an important event, that thing that Walt did.”

“I remember my summers in Oregon and going down there early in the morning and swimming all day long, just hanging out in the river. It was a little chilly back then. But once you got in that cold water, it felt so good and that’s why I love swimming every day, whenever I can.”

***

The Oregon premiere of Slide takes place on Thursday, Aug. 22, at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry as part of the Portland Festival of Cinema, Animation, and Technology. The film begins at 8 p.m., and Bill will be attending a post-screening reception where autographs and drawings will be available to all attendees.