Slide

"Keep the music snappy and the jacks happy."

The king of indie animation is back! Bill Plympton's first feature since 2016's Revengeance is a wacky western musical that is a testament to the American artist's idiosyncratic style of hand-drawn, sketchy (take that word as you will) animation full of exaggerated characters, delirious action sequences and irreverent humour only the man himself can come up with. Last year, we wrote that "watching a Plympton film is like discovering the power of a pencil for the very first time", and Slide emits that power in abundant quantities.

Welcome to the logging town of Sourdough Creek. Its egotistical, paunchy, money-grabbing mayor makes corruption his sport and is prepared to sacrifice a fishing village to build a luxury resort called 'Monte Carlo del Norte'. His goal? To cordially accommodate Tinselwood Studios and its film stars, keen on shooting a motion picture in the wild west. Enter Slide, a formidable cowboy and gifted guitar player whose coolness and taciturn character matches your favourite Clint Eastwood gunslinging hero. Will he - and his surprising monster friend or foe - be able to save the day?

Inspired by 1940s honky-tonk music by artists like Hank Williams and Patsy Cline, Slide is a zany tale of a mythical cowboy showdown with an eco-villain intent on making gold at the expense of his own people. With the action taking place in his hometown in Oregon and a protagonist who plays the slide guitar, this arguably Plympton's most personal film to date. Plympton provided every frame himself: 30,000 drawings ... In one interview, the American filmmaker described his latest feature as "the kind of film Mel Brooks would make if he'd been a cartoonist". Whether you watch Slide as a story about a mysterious cowboy or a grotesque critique on violence and anti-environmental capitalism, you'll find treasures in every corner of the frame.