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Fear of a Deadly Virus The prolific indie director Bill Plympton teams up with writer Danny Leonard for the pandemic-themed new short Demi’s Panic. By Karen Idelson
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t the start of the pandemic, Danny Leonard and Lorena Hernández Leonard watched their daughter suddenly become ill with a cough — the kind of cough that made everyone pull away from you at the time. When they took her to the pediatrician, the doctor was wearing what amounted to a hazmat suit. In April, 2020, COVID tests were in such short supply that their daughter didn’t receive one and they had to take her home not knowing whether she had the virus or whether the rest of the family could catch it from her. This trying experience became the inspiration for the lauded short film Demi’s Panic, which features animation by the legendary indie director Bill Plympton. The powerful short tells the story of a Latina woman in New York City who is overcome by fear as coronavirus spreads around her. “I had experienced anxiety and worry in my life, but never clinical anxiety,” says Danny Leonard, writer and producer of the short. “And I had the dubious distinction of experiencing it for the first time in my life [during the pandemic] and then realizing it’s very physical. It’s not just mental. Bill’s idea was to make that [visible] through Demi’s figure and the colors
that you see. So, as you know, he uses colored pencils to show how the anxiety manifests.”
A Timely Topic Plympton became involved in the project after Danny Leonard wrote the script over several months. A mutual friend suggested that Plympton look at the script to give feedback. Then, a surprising thing happened. “He sent me the script and it was something like 10 pages long,” says Plympton. “And it was really wonderful because not only was it a great story but it had really beautiful imagery in it. I loved the imagery a lot and, of course, it’s a very important topic right now. Then I did a storyboard and added even more of the manic visuals then he had in the script, but he liked it and he said that it worked well. So, I started designing the characters and I think there were something like 80 layouts. Once those were approved, we started the animation and it was a really fun project because the visuals were so interesting and the story was so engaging.” “Frankly, I was right in the middle of it because at that point New York City was shutting down,” adds Plympton. “It was very difficult. I had to close my studio and I couldn’t let people come back into my studio for over a year. It
just felt urgent and prescient.” So far, the short, which was funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, has been an official selection at HollyShorts, Woodstock Film Festival and the World Festival of Animated Film in Varna, Bulgaria, with an upcoming screening at Short Shorts Film Festival & Asia in Tokyo, Japan in late October. Plympton will also be participating on an Oscar contender short films panel at this month’s World Animation and VFX Summit in November.
Plympton finished the animation on the film in about two months with a small crew of four people. He worked with colored pencils and black markers as he has done so many times throughout his amazing career. The director says he was moved by the music used in the film, too. Daniel Jimenez Afanador composed the score of the film and worked with a group of classical musicians in Los Angeles as well as folkloric musicians in Colombia. The musicians used specific Colombian instruments
A Master at Work: Bill Plympton translated the script’s anxious energy into frenetic color pencil animation.
www.animationmagazine.net 80
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december 21
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