Bill Plympton To Be ‘Grilled’ By Signe Baumane At Metrograph For His 80th Birthday

Indie legend Bill Plympton is turning 80, and Metrograph is throwing him the kind of party only the animation world could dream up.

This Saturday, the Lower East Side cinema will host an onstage conversation between Plympton and fellow independent animator Signe Baumane, billed as a “friendly grill.” The evening pairs the chat with a curated program of seven of Plympton’s all-ages shorts, with the two animators digging into how the films were made and what four decades of stubborn independence actually looks like up close. The shorts that will be screened include:

• One of Those Days (Bill Plympton, 1988, 7 mins)
• Nose Hair (Bill Plympton, 1994, 7 mins)
• The Fan and the Flower (Bill Plympton, 2005, 8 mins)
• Santa the Fascist Years (Bill Plympton, 2008, 4 mins)
• The Cow Who Wanted to be a Hamburger (Bill Plympton, 2010, 6 mins)
• Duckville (Bill Plympton, 2024, 8 mins)
• Whale 52 (Bill Plympton, 2025, 10 mins)

Plympton, never one to undersell a good roast, had this to say about his interrogator and long-time friend:

You haven’t lived a worthy life if you haven’t been grilled by Signe Baumane. She’ll leave you well done for the rest of your life.

Baumane, perhaps getting the niceties out of the way before Saturday’s roasting, returned the affection in her own way, framing the evening as a tribute to a career that has shaped generations of independent animators:

Bill Plympton is the most influential independent animator who has ever lived. He has made over 120 shorts and feature films, been nominated for an Academy Award twice, worked with the likes of Whoopi Goldberg, Matthew Modine, and Paul Giamatti, and impacted thousands of careers.

The two filmmakers have been close friends and collaborators since 1995, when Baumane walked into Plympton’s New York studio for a short visit, which turned into an on-the-spot job offer to paint cels for the feature I Married a Strange Person. She worked on many more shorts in the coming years and, according to Baumane, Plympton is her “American Godfather” and the reason New York has been her home for the past three decades.

For fun, the duo programmed a “Battle of the Sexes,” in which she picked five animated sex shorts by women, and he five from men, and asked an audience to decide which gender was better at crafting the pieces. Baumane wouldn’t tell us the result of their poll, but said it will be shared on Saturday evening.

In addition to celebrating Plympton’s 80th, this weekend’s celebration is also ideally timed following the filmmaker’s return from the Berlin International Film Festival, where his latest short Whale 52 picked up the Generation Kplus Crystal Bear for best short film. The film is also slated to screen at Cannes later this month, adding another notch to a career that already includes Oscar nominations for Your Face (1987) and Guard Dog (2004), animation work on The Simpsons, and collaborations with everyone from Kanye West (a long time ago) to “Weird Al” Yankovic.

Saturday’s festivities kick off at 7:00 PM at Metrograph, 7 Ludlow Street.