Review: Bill Plympton makes the west extra wild in free-wheeling Slide

Yes, there's a cowboy and a saloon and lots of gunslingin' in Bill Plympton's latest feature, Slide, but it is anything but your typical western. As much an auteur as any filmmaker working today, Plympton has such a unique voice, a style that's instantly recognizable, and a delightfully weird sense of humor that make his movies something that could only come from him. That's certainly true of Slide, which is his first feature in almost a decade. (While the film has been making festival appearances for a couple years, it's just now making its way to theaters -- it opens at Cinema Village in NYC on November 28, which allows it to qualify for the Oscars.) 

Slide isn't just the name of the movie; it's also the name its mysterious hero goes by. He's a suave, towering, and very handsome cowboy, whose name likely comes from his instrument of choice: a slide guitar. After an unfortunately run-in with a violent storm, Slide washes up in Sourdough Creek, a town in turmoil.

Mayor Jeb Carver rules over the town with a watchful eye and an itchy trigger finger, and every decision he makes (alongside his dolt of a brother) is to make himself richer. When he receives a letter from a fancy Hollywood producer about wanting to shoot a film in Sourdough Creek, Jeb goes into overdrive. He has a vision for a new resort town complete with a casino resort and a dam, which will spell disaster for the nearby community of fishermen.  The Lucky Buck Saloon is the social center of the town, where alcohol and women keep the locals' spirits high, fueling them to work grueling hours in unsafe conditions to make Jeb's capitalistic dreams come true.

If that all sounds pretty straightforward or grounded, well, it gets a lot weirder on the fringes of the movie, such as the mythical Hellbug who haunts the surrounding areas. One of the Hollywood actors also has a love-hate relationship with his sidekick, a rabbit puppet. There are all sorts of strange and amusing little bits and bobs, so many little details that come together in unexpected ways. It's a deeply silly movie, one that will find time to introduce a contraption that makes the sex workers' boobs move up and down (or sideways for the kinky guys) or a musical number that involves a descent into hell, complete with cameos from Hitler and Darth Vader. This movie is so un-serious, and thus, a really fun watch.

I'm a big fan of Plympton's style. You can take any shot from one of his movies and immediately know its him at the helm. His animation looks like hasty but thoughtful doodles brought to stuttering life, a sketchbook being slipped with maybe a few pages missing here and there. It's raw, very alive. Most of the characters have that grotesque caricature look to them, bulging eyes, weird proportions, janky teeth, memorably designed. It's a rough-and-tumble approach to animation, one where you can feel the artistic oomph behind it. It makes me so happy to be an animation lover.

Also, it's a musical! There are a few musical numbers peppered throughout, along with a nice tweedily deedily score. Delilah, the sheriff's niece/Slide's love interest/reluctant sex worker, has a particularly lovely voice that made me think of Joni Mitchell. Which, like, it doesn't get better than that, musically.

While Slide doesn't necessarily have a lot of meat on the bone -- there isn't a lot to dig into thematically beyond pretty general critiques of capitalism -- it's so finely tuned to what it is and what it wants to do, that it feels to me like quite a success. This is a movie that wants to make you laugh, play you a few memorable tunes (the one that plays over the credits is maybe my favorite of all), throw in some absurd action beats, and call it a day. At just 70 minutes long, it's a breezy jaunt, and a thoroughly entertaining one.