The future of hand-drawn animated features is alive and well, but only in the world of independent cinema. Now that Studio Ghibli has announced plans to take a lengthy break from producing features, if not outright stopping entirely, it’s up to films like Bill Plympton’s Cheatin’ to take the mantle of hand-drawn animation and lead the charge in preventing the medium from dying out. Though that burden is arguably too much to bear for such an intentionally small-scope film, Cheatin’ at least proves that though hand-drawn animation may be one of the oldest forms of the medium, it’s plenty lively and colorful when its practitioners care.
The 76-minute film—funded partly through a Kickstarter campaign, its backers included in the closing credits—focuses on Ella, a gorgeous young woman, and Jake, the beefy gas station attendant who catches her eye one day at a carnival after he saves her from a deadly bumper-car accident. For a brief period, the couple are in passionate lust, if not love. (Any presumptions that animation is inherently for children can be ignored as soon as Ella and Jake have an operatic love-making session.) But when Jake is led to believe, by one of many women trying to lure him away, that Ella has been unfaithful, he chooses to fight back by being an equal cheater.
The narrative complications pile on top of each other, much like the bumper cars in that first-act setpiece, until Ella is chosen to inhabit another woman’s consciousness to get her revenge on the otherwise despondent and suicidal Jake. All of this story—certainly slight, as evidenced by the running time—is brought to life in Plympton’s jittery watercolor compositions. Some viewers may recognize his style from his work on MTV’s Liquid Television, and Cheatin’ only proves that he hasn’t lost his touch in over three decades of work. The high points come early, during the hyperactive and hallucinatory visualization of Ella and Jake’s psyches, especially when they come together under the sheets.
If there’s any problem, it’s in the machinations of the story, which seems to owe a debt to Greek tragedy. The true twist here is that Jake has been misled: Ella, in the end, is the only faithful one in the relationship, yet she—as well as the would-be paramours trying to seduce Jake—is portrayed weakly. Though Ella may get some form of redemption, and is posited as the focal point in the opening scenes, she exists primarily as a desirous object more than a person. Her character is never fleshed out, and this is partially due to Plympton’s decision to eschew dialogue in the film. But whatever flaws are present in Cheatin’ are balanced out by the colorful and vivid images, the rapid-fire pacing, and hot-blooded twists and turns. Films like this are rare and growing harder and harder to find. It’s encouraging that Cheatin’ exists, and that people are willing to pay for it sight unseen, but hand-drawn animation continues to get a raw deal in spite of offering far more creative possibilities. Cheatin’ is the latest proof that this form of animation—compared to its cousins—is limitless.
