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[Guest Writer Grey S. Wears is an all-out animation guru. Steeped in the lore of both TV cartoons and cinematic animation epics, one thing is for sure: If you want to know about anything animated, Grey's the guy to call. An animator in his own regard - he has a new project that will debut later this year via his Like The Color Productions - Grey is an active member of ASIFA Hollywood (The International Animated Film Society) and has written about animation for various publications in and around Los Angeles over the past few years. He is also the head writer for The Annie Awards.]  

This is what Plymptoons are all about! Guard Dog along with Guide Dog and Hot Dog are some of Plympton’s best work. The pencil-on-paper style is what one expects from Plympton starting with his Your Face through his feature films and the majority of his shorts and commercial work. Though the disc is called Dog Days it contains SO much more. Included on this disc are shorts: Guard Dog; Guide Dog; Hot Dog; The Fan and the Flower; Shuteye Hotel; Santa, The Fascist Years; Spiral.

For those unfamiliar with the Dog films, Guard Dog tells the story of a dog being walked in a park by his owner. The dog barks at every small child, squirrel and butterfly in the park, imagining that they would do harm to his owner. Plympton presents the harm that the dog imagines would come to his owner. This is what one expects from Plympton, imaginative violence. But the dog has such character that it’s much more than that. In the end the dog’s paranoia works to his own and his owner’s detriment. Guide Dog sees the same dog get a job as a seeing-eye dog and then as a fire dog in Hot Dog. Guard Dog garnered Plympton his second Academy Award nomination and it won a couple of other film festival honors. All three films are very entertaining.

The Fan and the Flower is a bit of a departure for Plympton in that it was written by Dan O’Shannon (Cheers, Frasier).  The story is very un-Plympton like. The animation is mostly black and white, but the characters are very well animated bringing it great life.  Paul Giamatti does the narration for the film. Plympton explains in his commentary (which exists for all the shorts) that he and O’Shannon had hoped for an Academy Award nomination or win. I for one can’t understand how this didn’t happen, but it did win numerous awards including the Annie Award (Animation’s equivalent to the Oscar) for best-animated short.

Shuteye Hotel is a much darker, noir film than Plympton’s usual style. In the hotel, people check in and are found the next morning without their head. It’s a “who done it?” of sorts. Plympton also used some CG animation in this film after hearing from his peers that he should get out of the dark ages (as explained in the commentary).

Santa, The Fascist Years tells the story of when Santa changed his workshop to making weapons instead of toys and attempts to take over the world in a “blitzenkrieg.” This film is narrated by Matthew Modine and animated in typical Plympton style. It’s a good story and a fun addition to the collection.

The final short, Spiral, starts with the credit of  “A W. P. Murton Film” - curious, and then this abstract animated short begins. After a few minutes of abstract animation I became bored and was wondering what this crap is all about. In the end it takes a turn and ends up being one of my favorite shorts on the disc, but I think I didn’t fully appreciate it until I listened to Plympton’s commentary track. Watching it a second time was a giggle fest. Bravo, Bill.

In case these short films weren’t enough the disc includes Plympton’s music videos for Kanye West’s Heard em’ Say, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s Don’t Download This Song and Parson Brown’s Mexican Standoff. In addition are ten of Plympton’s commercial and commissioned works including his credit sequence from the Madonna movie Who’s that Girl? And an excerpt from the documentary F*CK, titled Bird is the Word.

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