Having seen Bill Plympton’s Oscar-nominated animated short "Guard Dog," I was interested in his feature-length effort, the similarly animated Idiots and Angels. Quite frankly, I don’t know what to make of it. The dialogue-free film focuses on a despicable man who grows wings that force him to do good…against his will. The character never demonstrates that he has learned his lesson or wants to do good, yet in the end he’s hailed as a hero. He even gets the girl (whom he has molested earlier) and is somehow treated as a man redeemed. During his Q&A session, Plympton said he wanted to illustrate the notion that everyone has a bit of both an idiot and an angel inside him. The story, he said, is about which one will triumph. I just wish that the triumph of the angelic side hadn’t been involuntary.

To the film’s credit, the animation is quite beautiful. The kinetic motion of its action scenes is  thrilling, especially considering that the film consists of 25,000 frames, all hand-drawn by Plympton, then scanned and composed together with the assistance of Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. If you want to appreciate the vanishing art of true human-drawn animation, Idiots and Angels is worth checking out for this reason alone.