The Flying House Project

Oscar-nominated animator and beloved iconoclast Bill Plympton decided to remaster Winsor McCay's 1921 animated short The Flying House. Part of a series based on McCay's comic strip “Dream of a Rarebit Fiend,” the short focuses on a woman who goes to bed after a Welsh rarebit dinner and dreams that her overweight husband has rebelled against paying their mortgage by turning their house into a giant airplane—complete with a propeller. The couple fly their home through various locations, knocking over a water tower and wrecking an arboretum before taking off into space and landing on the moon, where an unfriendly giant tries to crush them with a fly swatter. While McCay's animation is subversively inventive, Plympton takes the restoration process a little too far, as the silent, black-and-white original is colorized and saddled with a new dialogue track featuring Matthew Modine and Patricia Clarkson as the airborne duo. Even worse, Plympton re-edited the whole thing by removing the comic strip–style dialogue balloons used by McCay to compensate for the lack of sound recording. In doing so, Plympton completely transforms the source work's distinctively goofy style (and, quite frankly, the dialogue balloons are more enchanting than Modine and Clarkson's hammy voice performances). DVD extras include a pre-restored original version of McCay's short, a “making-of” featurette, and interviews with animation historians. A strange endeavor, overall, this is an optional purchase. Aud: C, P. (P. Hall)