**/****
starring the voices of Dan McComas, Francine Lobis, Matthew Brown
written and directed by Bill Plympton

by Walter Chaw Oscar-winning animator Bill Plympton's full-length animated feature The Tune is among my all-time favourite films. It's perverse, hilarious–a whiff of brilliance, proving Einstein's contention that imagination is more powerful than science and the truism that the pen is sharper by far than the rapier wit. Detailing a jingle writer's search for the perfect commercial hymn, The Tune is 80 minutes of kinetic bliss sketched out in Plympton's distinctively rough style that nonetheless demonstrates the kind of pure artistry betrayed by, say, Bill Watterson. It is with great anticipation, then, that I entered Mr. Plympton's latest foray into squiggles for the cinema, Mutant Aliens–and it is with some disappointment that I left the auditorium 80-odd minutes later. Eighty very odd minutes, as it turns out, and more's to the benefit of the film and of no surprise to the illustrator's fans. What offsets Plympton's trademark lunacy this time around, however, is not a joy of creation, but rather a somewhat disturbing puerility that relies once too often on humping to further the plot or provide comic relief. Mutant Aliens plays a little like Harlan Ellison's short story "How's the Nightlife on Cissalda?": all xeno-erotica and bestiality. Except for a few moments involving how a man imagines his member (chainsaw, locomotive, erupting volcano, wild horses), the rampant sexuality of Mutant Aliens mostly falls embarrassingly flat.