American animator and Academy Award nominee Bill Plympton recently visited 满帆 to share insights into his creative process and talk about his new, 动画长片 幻灯片. Plympton fell in love with animation as a child watching the works of American cartoonist Charles Addams, 的创造者 亚当斯一家, and Walt Disney Animation. He dreamed of working for Disney one day and grew up to pursue animation as a career, despite the warnings from his blue-collar family.

然而, when Plympton entered the scene in the late 1980s, he was told by numerous people that the field of animation was dead. He applied to work for Disney, but they turned him away for being too young. “‘Come back in 20 years,’” he recalled them saying.

But Plympton continued to chase his dreams despite the doubts, always sketching and always looking for the next opportunity. 然后, in 1987, he took all the sketches he had been working on in his own time and created a three-minute short film entitled 你的脸, which went on to land him an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Short 电影.

从那时起, he has received several awards, such as the Prix Spécial du Jury at the Cannes 电影 Festival, and another nomination for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short 电影 with his 2004 short film 看门狗. His work has also been featured in 《菠菜台子大全》, on the History Channel, and even in a Kanye West music video.

Plympton has treasured being an independent animator, working on each project with a very small team and enjoying the peace of sketching his own ideas on his own terms. He recalled to students how he is constantly drawing in his free time on any paper he can find, sometimes on the back of mail or scraps of printed paper lying around the house. 他解释说, “Not having the pressure to be something great, 一些聪明的, it just relieves me to be drawing.”

在他成功之后, Plympton says that Walt Disney Animation Studios actually approached him with a $1 million offer of representation, flying a lawyer all the way out to Bill’s apartment in New York to close the deal.

“圣牛!他回忆道。. “My childhood dream, plus a million bucks!”

He was initially excited about the prospect, but when it was revealed that Disney would own a portion of all of Plympton’s work from there on out, he realized the love for his independence superseded his need for wealth or acclaim. 如果他签了协议, Disney would have a say in all of his creative decisions, 他告诉学生, so, 最终, he turned the deal down and sent the lawyer on his way.

“[I love] when I wake up in the morning, and I go to my drawing board and start drawing and there’s no one looking over my shoulder and saying, ‘No, 你不能这么做.’ To me, drawing what I want is worth more than a million bucks.”

在他的演讲中, Plympton drew and signed sketches of several of his original characters and said that he would be donating them to the university. 后来, he gathered all of the students in attendance and invited them down to received signed autographs and sketches of one of his original characters, which he drew and signed for them in real time.