Hair High (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Bill PlymptonRelease Date(s)
2004 (April 21, 2026)Studio(s)
Plymptoons/Starz Distribution (Deaf Crocodile Films)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: B+
Review
Hair High was Bill Plympton’s fourth feature-length animated film, and it represented something of a turning point for him. While the world of traditional cel animation had already moved into the digital realm by 2004, Plympton was still stubbornly sticking with his hand-crafted ways. Yet even his own process had evolved ever since his first feature The Tune in 1992, and while he was still handling all of the drawings personally, he was working with teams that dealt with other things like the inking and painting. Hair High was produced the same way, and yet it marked the end of that era, as he would end up transitioning to digital afterwards (and given how labor-intensive his work had been up until that point, he never looked back, either). While there’s nothing inherently wrong with digital animation, Hair High arguably remains the pinnacle of his work, partly due to its hand-crafted nature, but also due to the fact that he was telling a personal story inspired (ever so loosely) by a few of his experiences as a young person.
Hair High opens with a framing device that features a teenage couple who engage in a pointless argument while at the local diner. Well, to be more precise, it actually opens with a couple of flies having sex (this is a Bill Plympton cartoon, after all), but that’s just to set up the lack of real connection between the two teens, Wally (Michael Showalter) and Buttercup (Hayley DuMond). The diner’s owner Jojo (Keith Carradine) tries to smooth things over between them by sharing the story of Spud (Eric Gilliland) and Cherri (Sarah Silverman), two teens who faced some romantic challenges of their own, but their love was able to transcend all obstacles.
In Jojo’s telling, Spud was a newcomer at Echo Lake High School, a nerdy outsider who was rejected by the “in” crowd led by the studly Rod (Dermot Mulroney). Cherri was Rod’s girlfriend, but when Spud inadvertently gave them offense, Rod forced the new student to act as her personal servant. Neither Cherri nor Spud could stand each other at first, but eventually they started to fall in love, leading to them trying to attend the prom together—which also led to tragedy when Rod tried to enact revenge. But while Cherri and Spud’s love still managed to conquer all, will Jojo’s story rekindle anything between his young patrons? Hair High also stars the voice talents of David Carradine, Beverly D’Angelo, Martha Plimpton, Ed Begley, Jr., Justin Long, and the late great Tom Noonan.
As that description should make clear, Hair High has all the trappings of classic high school romantic melodramas, filtered through the warped imagination of Bill Plympton. Regardless of the macabre direction that the story takes once Rod decides that he’ll do anything to get between Cherri and Spud, it still feels like an animated retelling of John Waters’ Cry Baby, only instead of being the Squares vs. the Drapes, it’s the new kid vs. the entire school—and with everything taken to the next level in a way that could only be achieved in animation. Prison couldn’t keep Cry Baby and Allison apart, but even death itself can’t separate Cherri and Spud. Hair High still offers the rockabilly flavor of Cry Baby mixed with a generous dose of the trademarked John Waters bad taste, but that bad taste is delivered via Plympton’s own trademarked visual style, where anything and everything goes.
“In a cartoon, you can do anything,” Tex Avery’s Big Heel-Watha once said, and Bill Plympton has always taken that lesson to heart. There has long been a body horror element in his work going all the way back to Your Face in 1987. In Plympton’s films, the human body is pushed, pulled, squashed, transformed, transmogrified, and verily even torn asunder, only to be put right back together again. Combined with his love of reductio ad absurdum and beating jokes to death, that can lead to scenes in Hair High like the one where the schoolkids all start competing with each other by “making faces” (with all that may entail), or when the teacher Mr. Snerd (David Carradine) accidentally swallows his cigarette and eventually ends up being disemboweled. Yet interestingly enough, the only moment that might make viewers squeamish is when Rod uses his friend Zip’s fingernail to demonstrate what he wants to do to Spud, but that’s probably because anything to do with fingernails is all too relatable. You can indeed do anything in an animated cartoon, so be forewarned.
Plympton’s “anything goes” attitude in Hair High extends beyond the merely grotesque into an unrestrained (and rather earthy) view of sexuality, human or otherwise. His second animated feature I Married a Strange Person! had opened with two birds coupling in mid-flight, which portended things to come (so to speak), and the randy flies that open Hair High are no less an indication that Plympton’s mind will remain firmly in the gutter for the rest of the film. Yet befitting a teen sex comedy, most of this is handled somewhat elliptically, but still in an appropriately childish manner. The Echo Lake High football team is named the Fighting Cocks, so their biggest rivals are inevitably called The Beavers. In case that’s too subtle, during a match between the two teams, where the chicken-suited mascot ends up running amok, the announcer helpfully points out that “You gotta admit that cock’s full of spunk.”
Yet funnily enough, despite all of the verbal (and visual) double entendres and/or body horror in Hair High, it’s ultimately a sweet-natured story about true love winning over all, with even death not being strong enough to keep these lovers apart. Love has been a key theme in most of Bill Plympton’s features going all the way back to The Tune, whether it’s the love between various characters, or a love of music, or even love for the animation medium itself. Even at their earthiest or most grotesque, Plympton’s films are openly affectionate on every possible level. Hair High has always been one of Plympton’s favorites among his own films, and it’s easy to see why: because every frame of the film is filled with a deep affection for the characters, the situations that they face, the music, and yes, the hand-crafted animation that he was about to abandon. Plympton may not have looked back after making the move to digital, but clearly he still recognizes the fact that Hair High was a high-water mark that signified the end of an era.
Hair High was animated via traditional cel animation and photographed on 35mm film by cinematographer John Donnelly, framed at 1.66:1. While there aren’t any details about this version, it’s presumably based on a 2K scan of the original negative, just like the rest of Deaf Crocodile’s Bill Plympton releases. And all of the imperfections in those cels have been left perfectly intact, including dirt, dust, speckles, and other blemishes (a few hairs here and there, too). While any “real” damage to the film elements has been carefully removed, the natural textures and imperfections in the animation process have all been left untouched, just like they should. The textures of the backgrounds have also been left alone, like the brush and pencil strokes, and the encoding by Fidelity in Motion means that the film grain looks natural and is free of compression artifacts. The colors all seem accurate, right down to the wavering that sometimes results from inconsistent inking and/or coloring between the frames.
Audio is offered in English 2.0 DTS-HD Master Audio with optional English and English SDH subtitles. While Plympton’s previous films were mono, Hair High was released in Dolby Stereo, and this is indeed a matrix-encoded surround mix. Sound effects like crowd noises and frogs bouncing around the room (don’t ask) are steered in and out of the surrounds. Even the choral music gets into the action, with various voices surrounding the listening position. It’s a Plympton film, so the score and songs are a major element in the mix, and the various pieces by Hank Bones, Corey Allen Jackson, and Maureen McElheron all help drive the story of Hair High.
The Deaf Crocodile Deluxe Limited Edition Blu-ray release of Hair High includes a 60-page booklet featuring essays by Walter Chaw and John Holderried, plus an abundance of Bill Plympton’s artwork. Everything comes housed in a rigid slipcase with a J-card slipcover, both of which feature artwork by The Man himself, while the new artwork on the disc insert is by Beth Morris. The set is limited to 1750 units, although Deaf Crocodile is also offering a standard version that omits the booklet and the slipcase. The following extras are included:
- Commentary by Adam Rackoff, James Hancock, and Martin Kessler
- Commentary by Bill Plympton
- Shuteye Hotel (HD – 7:24)
- Horn Dog (HD – 4:46)
- Horny High (HD – 10:45)
- Interview with Bill Plympton and Maureen McElheron (HD – 58:10)
- Scene Breakdown (Upscaled SD – 1:58)
- Anicam (Upscaled SD – 6:49)
- Film Premiere in Portland (Upscaled SD – 13:11)
- Voiceover Session with Ed Begley Jr. (Upscaled SD – 6:34)
- Voiceover Session with Sarah Silverman (Upscaled SD – 3:04)
The new extras start with a commentary that reteams James Hancock of the Wrong Reel podcast and animation producer Adam Rackoff, joined by Czech-Canadian podcaster Martin Kessler. Hancock and Rackoff have worked with Plympton on various short films, while Kessler is along to provide more of an outsider’s perspective. But they’re all equally in love with Hair High, so they offer an enthusiastic appraisal of the film. That includes many of the subtle details like the way that the phallic nature of the hairdos evolve. They feel that Hair High is more structured than Plympton’s previous features, and so it’s also more accessible. They don’t discuss the production of the film very much, although they do note that while it was Plympton’s last film to be animated traditionally, it was his first to be edited non-linearly. (While they love the hand-crafted look of cel animation, they agree that Plympton was more than happy to move to digital animation instead.) They do cover the amazing cast, with a special emphasis on the Carradines (and it’s obvious that they recorded the track before Tom Noonan’s recent passing). This isn’t so much an analysis of Hair High as it is an appreciation, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Deaf Crocodile has included two more of Plympton’s shorts with this release. Shuteye Hotel (2007) is a neo-noir story that opens with a series of murders at a seedy hotel, leading to a police investigation that nearly goes horribly, horribly awry. Stylistically, it’s a change of pace for Plympton, with monochromatic visuals that are punctuated with splashes of red blood. Horn Dog (2009) was the second sequel to Plympton’s Oscar-nominated 2004 short Guard Dog. This time, the poor dog for whom nothing ever goes as planned is smitten by a female dog that he spots one morning, and unsurprisingly, his uncontrollable anxieties mean that things go horribly, horribly awry for him as well.
Horny High is a visual essay by Celeste de la Cabra. They provide an overview of Plympton’s work, with an emphasis on its not particularly family-friendly nature, before breaking down how that plays out in Hair High. They note that it’s a palpably horny film, where sex and social standing intertwine, and they also look at the role that gender has in establishing the social castes in the film. With Plympton, all of that is handled satirically, and it could only function as well as it does in the animation medium.
The last of the new extras is an online Interview with Bill Plympton and Maureen McElheron, moderated as usual by Deaf Crocodile’s Dennis Bartok. Plympton and McElheron reminisce about their long history together that started with music and worked its way into Plympton’s animation. They weave their way in and out of the world of Hair High, from its influences to challenges in putting the project together and seeing it through to the end (after he ran out of money, of course). They also discuss some of what they’ve worked on since then, as well as a few of their musical favorites. Note that there are some technical problems this time around, with Plympton and Bartok’s cameras breaking up repeatedly while McElheron’s camera isn’t working at all, but it’s still an enjoyable conversation.
The archival extras kick off with a commentary by Plympton that was originally recorded in 2004 for the DVD release of the film (although that didn’t actually happen until 2010). He says that Hair High is also his personal favorite of all his films, and that it had the biggest budget that he had worked with due in no small part to the voice cast. (Speaking of which, he tells a genuinely weird story about David Carradine.) He explains his inspirations for the story, including which elements were based on his own experiences—which is more than you might think. He also explores the designs, the cel animation process (confirming that he does indeed prefer digital), and the themes in the film—in case it wasn’t already crystal-clear, hair is a metaphor for sexual prowess. There’s some inevitable overlap between the two commentaries (there’s a good chance that Hancock, Rackoff, and Kessler listened to this before recording their own), but they’re both worth a listen.
The Scene Breakdown takes on the frog scene, comparing the storyboards to the scene from the final film (with footage from David Carradine’s voice recording sessions thrown in for good measure), while the Anicam is a timelapse video showing Plympton drawing multiple frames from the film. Regarding the voice recording sessions, there’s also footage of Ed Begley, Jr. and Sarah Silverman working through their own performances. Finally, there’s footage of Plympton, along with the cast and crew, appearing at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland for the premiere of Hair High.
Hair High was Bill Plympton’s fourth animated feature film, and now it’s the fourth one to be released in a stellar Blu-ray edition by Deaf Crocodile. They’ve lavished the same amount of love on the transfer and the extras as Plympton did on the film itself, making it a worthy addition to their ever-expanding catalogue. It’s highly recommended for anyone who loves animation the same way that Bill Plympton and Deaf Crocodile do.
Now, here’s to hoping that Idiots and Angels is on its way soon...
- Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).