Mutant Aliens

Outrageous, outlandish, and more than a little perverse, Mutant Aliens could only have sprung from the mind and drawing board of animator Bill Plympton. As with his previous features The Tune and I Married a Strange Person, Plympton can't sustain an idea very long before he drifts into wild digressions, in this case involving plenty of boisterous sex and blood-spattering violence, and his story's too weak to hold your undivided attention. Still, who else but Plympton could serve up a raunchy freak-show about a stranded astronaut rescued by nose-shaped aliens, his sexually insatiable daughter and her dim-bulb boyfriend, a bevy of mutated lab animals, and a greedy corporate shark bent on exploiting them all? Plympton's minimalist style combines watercolor impressionism with crudely animated weirdness; he's got the mind of a juvenile delinquent, indulging his fantasies through animation that's unmistakably his own. If that means that storytelling takes a back seat to bizarre space oddities, who better than Plympton to go crazily over the top? --Jeff Shannon