Bill's Dirty Shorts

As the title suggests, this DVD is mostly comprised of the more salacious pieces from independent animator Bill Plympton, films that might easily offend tender sensibilities, and even some fairly hardened ones. All nine shorts exhibit his idiosyncratic hand-drawn style, often in the service of graphic sexual jokes, scatological riffs, and bloodletting. And while some are featurette-length (like the eight-minute pilot for a television series about a trio of mismatched roommates or a nine-minute short about a restaurant that ends in an orgy of vomiting), others are composed of extremely brief snippets combined into little anthologies with titles such as 1997's “Sex & Violence” and the 1998 sequel “More Sex & Violence,” while still others offer up a chain of gruesome Candid Camera-like episodes. The humor is very much hit-and-miss; in fact, the funniest piece here is probably the most conventional—2002's “Parking,” a five-minute comedy about a malicious weed that infuriates the attendant at a newly-opened parking lot. The near-hour-long series of shorts is supplemented by another half-hour's worth of Flash animations (30 in all), exhibiting the same focus on sex and violence; four sets of commercials for companies like Geico and AT&T; and an opening title sequence for a failed TV sitcom. Plympton completists will want to add this, but despite occasional bits of brilliance these pieces are neither among his best, nor are they worth the patron challenge fights. Optional. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)