by MARK SLUTSKY

If you’re tired of the gleaming computer-generated perfection that passes for animation these days, you might find the work of Bill Plympton refreshing. The artist and director (his animated films include I Married a Strange Person! and Mutant Aliens, and he’s directed a couple of live-action features as well) animates the old-fashioned way: by hand-drawing and colouring individual cells, several dozen thousand of which are usually needed to make a feature.

Plympton’s latest is called Hair High. It’s a ’50s-style pompadour pastiche in the Grease mould, with a little urban-legend-style horror thrown in.

The hero of the film is Spud (voiced by Eric Gilliland), the new kid in town, who ends up offending the teenage reigning couple, Cherri (this week’s cover girl, Sarah Silverman) and Rod (Dermot Mulroney) on his first day at school. To make up for his misdeeds, Spud’s forced to be Cherri’s slave, and their initial antipathy gradually turns into love. Outrage, car crashes and a haunted prom are soon to follow.

Plympton has a really interesting animation style, with plenty of elongation and full of shots skewed into crazy perspectives. His work is totally distinct, and there’s lots of gross and funny stuff (especially gross) on display here, like teachers coughing up their guts and decomposing prom queens.

But two things make Hair High difficult to enjoy. The first is that Plympton’s animation is a bit hard to take in long (ie. feature-length) doses, especially as he’s not a particularly gifted storyteller—the pacing is often off, and the jokes don’t always play out as well as they should. (He could probably use a good collaborator at the script level.) The second is that Hair High, originally a 35mm film, is being distributed on a very poor video transfer. The image is frequently jagged and the brightness levels vary alarmingly, often within the same scene. The sound quality is just as bad, crackly and sometimes even distorted. Hopefully the DVD will be an improvement, as Plympton’s incredibly hard work deserves better.

Hair High opens at Cinéma du Parc Friday, Feb. 10

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