New Trailer for Bill Plympton's Oscar-Shortlisted "Footprints"

Animation legend and underground artist, Bill Plympton just released a trailer for his newest short film Footprints. The film was recently shortlisted for the Oscar's Best Animated Short Film along with nine others. Plympton is an best known for his 1987 Academy Award-nominated animated short Your Face in which a second-rate crooner sings about the beauties of his lover's face as his own face metamorphosizes into surreal shapes and contortions. The artist is known for his off-beat, satirical and surrealist style of animation, and Footprints seems to continue the same. According to Plympton himself, Footprints is an “environmental” film that was done entirely in ballpoint pen. The trailer follows an type of modern day "everyman" character who is awakened by someone or something breaking the window of his front door. After seeing a set of footprints leading away from his door, the man sets out with a gun in pursuit of the unknown vandal. He travels over land and sea in his determined pursuit imagining the criminal as some gigantic, tree-eating monster.   The film's perspective is skewed, and Plympton has given it a noticeable lens aberration and an extreme curvature to add to the surrealism. It seems clear from the trailer that the film's plot revolves around a search for a perpetrator that probably ends up being the a self-discovery. The "environmental" theme is evident given the tree-eating monsters and carbon "footprints" the man is obsessed with following even as his trail blazing search destroys beautiful fields of flowers. Footprints looks to be a visually interesting and thought provoking work that may end up garnering another Oscar nomination and win for Plympton.