Biography of Animator Bill Plympton

Bill Plympton was born April 30^th 1946 to Don and Wilda Plympton in Portland Oregon. Bill claims his childhood as the catalyst for starting his career in animation. Oregon's rainy climate forced him to stay inside where he began to draw.

He didn't spend all of his time indoor though, he also was a cub scout and played little league when the weather was right.

When he was fourteen he sent some of his cartoons to Disney in hopes of getting hired but they wrote back and told him that he was too young, although his drawings showed that he had promised.

At Oregon City High School he participated in basketball, swimming and was a member of art club. He graduated in 1964 and went on to Portland State University. There he was an editor of the yearbook and a member of the film society. It was for this film society that he made his first animation. He attempted to make a yearbook promo but shot it upside-down, making it completely unusable.

Plympton served in the National Guard from 1967 to 1972. In 1968, he moved to New York City and attended the School of Visual Arts. He began his career as an illustrator and a cartoonist. He designed the magazines: Cineaste, Filmmakers Newsletter, and Film Society Review. His illustrations have been published in The New York Times, Vogue, House Beautiful, The Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Screw, and Vanity Fair. His cartoons appeared in such magazines as Viva, Penthouse, Rolling Stone, National Lampoon, and Glamour. In 1975, in The Soho Weekly News, he made a political cartoon strip named "Plympton" By 1981, it was syndicated in over twenty papers by Universal Press.

All his life Bill Plympton has been fascinated by animation and in 1983 he was approached to animate on the film "Boomtown". Connie D' Antuono, one of the film's producers, mentored him.

Immediately following the completion of "Boomtown", he began his own film, "Drawing Lesson #2." Production of the live-action scenes was slow, due to bad weather, so Plympton decided to start on another film. He contacted an old friend with whom he had performed in a Country Western Band with for help.