Powerful

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

Hair High is a take-off of retro high school dramas, as a mild-mannered student finds himself being tortured by the top echelon at his new school. The story is little more than a frame for a series of insane set pieces that range from flies having sex to a crazed car battle. This episodic, gag-first approach keeps one from caring much about the characters or events, but it's pretty consistently funny.Bill Plympton has a weird sense of humor, but his mix of surreal cleverness and outrageous is always lots of fun. Hair High isn't quite as good as his shorts, but it is thoroughly enjoyable.

This is a bit of a psychedelic rockabilly animated nightmare. Packed with 50s American cool, depicted with 60s European charm. Telling the story Spud, a new kid in high school, it's a familiar and not particularly original story, but Spud is likeable and as he says "he just doesn't know the rules". The rules being that teenagers are obnoxious and if movies have taught us anything, it's American teens are more obnoxious, stupid and self centred than most. It certainly seems that Bill Plympton has made exactly the film he wanted to... a pretty disgusting, dialled up to 11 X-Rated version of The Rugrats do Carrie. His style signposts every inch of this and feels devoid of outside interference, which in itself is pretty cool. For all it's B-Movie cool though, it boasts a pretty decent cast of voice actors. I can honestly say I've never seen anything quite like this before.

This feature-length offering from Bill Plympton starts out strong, drags a little in the middle and finishes okay. It's hard to sustain the level of hilarity that the introduction carries across the length of an animated feature, from the raw characterizations to the stylish presentation. The music remains strong throughout, with toe-tapping original music presented in a well-integrated fashion with the plot.Big kids will love this. Some of it is obscenely funny and grotesque (like Mr. Snerd hacking up his entrails) and some of it is outright obscene (Zip's mad orgy in a chicken suit, but since the chicken really acts like a rooster...I guess this may be a tip of the hat to a 10% theme). Obscene, yes, but obscenely funny as well.Good style, lots of laughs and entertaining.

While the story is pretty good (although very used), this kind of animation just blows. it looks like the animator is down right lazy. instead of 10 frames he uses the same 2 over and over. i've seen better animation by first year art student. i mean it. And the dubbing synchronization (and voices characterization all-in-all) is poor: when someone looks (visually) like he's shouting, their voice is dry and in normal volume. there is way too much silence and lack of sound effects to make the scenes work and be coherent, instead of just frames flickering around with big random pauses.There are so many great storytellers and animators out there. I really can't figure out why Plympton is considered such a great one.A sheer disappointment.