“It’s about an asshole who wakes up one morning with wings on his back, and how he deals with how these wings make him do good things.” – Bill Plympton



While the filmmaker’s synopsis of his latest work is typically unassuming, the delicate pencil lines of Idiots and Angels contain a coruscating critique of normatively repressive social mores – from sexual fantasies to the murder of a winged man. As the misanthropic antagonist’s paranoiac-critical phantasies spill from interior to exterior, Plympton uncomfortably discloses that at the centre of misanthropy lies androcentric loneliness. Sylvain Chomet aside, Idiots and Angels lies closer to the work of Michel Houellebecq than to any contemporary animated output. This feature plays like a sketched cousin to Philippe Harel’s Houellebecq adaptation Extension du Domaine de la Lutte (EIFF 2000), with both films positing that masculine emotional reticence must embrace that intrinsic particle called femininity, if masculinity is to cure its collective existential nadir.

Just as Idiots and Angels’ deconstruction of space and normative (mis)behaviours recalls that perambulating hiccup Jacques Tati, its formal play also fondly echoes the spatial dynamics of UPA Studios’ animation: this lineage is traceable to the sublime disorientations of that studio’s The Tell-Tale Heart. It is a rare bloom indeed, recalling Chuck Jones, Ted McKeever, Roy Andersson and Friedrich Nietzsche playing a game of exquisite corpse – whilst remaining unequivocally sui generis. As Plympton bravely posits that there may not be a God, he also affirms there is everything else: sunshine hazing through a windowed morn; a lover’s proximity as tactile as a pencil’s caress on paper; a lambent flame immolating the sheer idiocy of a traffic jam…