DIFF ’01: Mutant Aliens

**/****
starring the voices of Dan McComas, Francine Lobis, Matthew Brown
written and directed by Bill Plympton

by Walter Chaw Oscar-winning animator Bill Plympton's full-length animated feature The Tune is among my all-time favourite films. It's perverse, hilarious–a whiff of brilliance, proving Einstein's contention that imagination is more powerful than science and the truism that the pen is sharper by far than the rapier wit. Detailing a jingle writer's search for the perfect commercial hymn, The Tune is 80 minutes of kinetic bliss sketched out in Plympton's distinctively rough style that nonetheless demonstrates the kind of pure artistry betrayed by, say, Bill Watterson. It is with great anticipation, then, that I entered Mr. Plympton's latest foray into squiggles for the cinema, Mutant Aliens–and it is with some disappointment that I left the auditorium 80-odd minutes later. Eighty very odd minutes, as it turns out, and more's to the benefit of the film and of no surprise to the illustrator's fans. What offsets Plympton's trademark lunacy this time around, however, is not a joy of creation, but rather a somewhat disturbing puerility that relies once too often on humping to further the plot or provide comic relief. Mutant Aliens plays a little like Harlan Ellison's short story "How's the Nightlife on Cissalda?": all xeno-erotica and bestiality. Except for a few moments involving how a man imagines his member (chainsaw, locomotive, erupting volcano, wild horses), the rampant sexuality of Mutant Aliens mostly falls embarrassingly flat.

Earl Jensen (voiced by Dan McComas) is a brave astronaut whose Apollo 13-style marooning in space is the device by which the evil Dr. Frubar (George Casden) garners support and sympathy for a cash-poor space program. Unexpectedly, Jensen returns from the outer reaches twenty years later accompanied by the titular mutants on a quest to avenge his ignominious exile. Meanwhile, in the intervening decades, his young daughter Josie (Francine Lobis) has grown into an extremely buxom astronomer courted lasciviously by the burley Darby (Matthew Brown). Through a series of flashbacks, a brief gumming of the president, and the obliteration of battalions of national guardsmen, Mutant Aliens mocks the halcyon days of vintage sci-fi, from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Silent Running, placing the sexual subtexts of many of those films front and centre while it's at it.

As with any Plympton, there are long moments of bona fide pleasure in Mutant Aliens, self-reliant vignettes that exhibit the man's gift for transmogrification and witty subversion of traditional narrative modes. But too much of the movie is either a little dull or, worse, guilty of the kind of sober stage death that afflicts stand-ups on an off night. The rhythm of the piece seems to be out of step, and Plympton's obsessions this time around with bodily violation and corruption (David Cronenberg as cartoonist: imagine it) manifest themselves in ways just a touch too literal. It's not without its pleasures, but I'll stick with The Tune.