SLAMDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 2024 REVIEW! The wild west gets painted a deep shade of weird with Slide, produced and directed by the ever-zany Bill Plympton. The script by Plympton and Jim Lujan takes place in the tiny town of Sourdough Creek. This podunk place is run by the greasy mayor, Jeb Carver (Lujan), and his brother Zeke (Tom Racine), who also owns the local whorehouse. Jeb gets a message from the Tinsel Wood film producer J. Lyle Pendergrass (Ken Mora) that he’s scouting locations for his next big picture and wants to know if Sourdough Creek has what he’s looking for.
Smelling fame and money, Jeb immediately responds that the town recently built a huge resort and also has the scenic lake by a mountain he was looking for. Jeb immediately reaches out to the local loggers to start building a resort as well as a dam to make a lake. They have a week. The only thing that stands in the way is a small fishing hamlet with pesky fishermen that will need to be leveled. But somewhere in the woods, the monstrous Hell Bug (John Holderried) watches from behind the trees.
Meanwhile, the sheriff’s daughter, Delilah (Maureen McElheron), is stuck working as a sex worker, though she harbors dreams of singing. The whorehouse needs a new guitar player for the house band, as Jeb keeps shooting them for playing too slowly. That is when Slide (Daniel Kaufman) strolls in with a slide guitar that can bring a tear to anyone’s eye. Let’s just hope he can play fast enough to stay alive.
“…somewhere in the woods, the monstrous Hell Bug watches…”
Plympton gone western plays like a painting by Frederic Remington on peyote. Slide instantly reminds you how unique his animation style is. He makes sure you know this is hand-drawn, with lots of cross-hatching and grotesque cartoon extremities. He employs impossible angles, putting his camera in places that no real-life camera could ever go. The filmmaker tops it off with his signature touch of leaving several pieces of the motion out to create an irresistible jerky movement. Any animation can flow, but you have to work to jerk. It has a coming off of strychnine vibe that is irreplaceable.
But there’s even more in this particular Plympton picnic basket. When Slide arrives on-screen, the director uses a sepia color pallet with the same shades as old western photographs. He keeps the colors intentionally washed out until they pop like mad during fantasy sequences or dreams, like The Wizard Of Oz. And when things get crazed, the colors get unhinged to the point of burning down the doorway and the hole in space left behind. Plympton is a surrealist whose paintings follow you from room to room.
Like The Tune, Plympton revisits his theme that music can solve any problem. The hero is a musician, in this case, a Stevie Ray Vaughn-like silhouette. The music itself is lovely. I usually cringe when the song numbers come on, but not here. The thrust of the story has historical roots in how Sedona custom-built a resort in the 1940s that was designed specifically to house film productions. There are major themes of the destructive elements of development and odorous eminent domain.
Also, herein is a stark version of the artistic struggle that burns true. Even if you don’t care for saddles and sagebrush much, you are going to want to cowboy up for this one. It is an acid flashback wearing spurs. If you go out of your way for that old-school cool adult animation, slide right on over to Slide. It is another example of why Bill Plympton will always be one of the greatest animators of all time.
Slide screened at the 2024 Slamdance Film Festival.
"…a stark version of the artistic struggle that burns true."
