Mutant Aliens

MUTANT ALIENS (2001, Plymptoons Studio, 81 min.) Legendary animator Bill Plympton's lovably twisted tribute to alien invasion films ala THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT, 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH and MARS ATTACKS! features an American astronaut named Earl Jensen (voiced by Dan McComas) who's intentionally stranded in space by his evil boss, Dr. Frubar (voiced by George Casden). Twenty years later, his now-grown daughter Josie (voiced by Francine Lobis) is an astronomer with some serious lust for her hunky boyfriend (their hanky panky is both R-rated and hilarious, with his phallus in turns transforming into a charging rhino, steam train and exploding volcano). Their lovemaking and Dr. Frubar's evil plans are both interrupted by the unexpected return of her missing father, astronaut Earl - who reveals he apparently survived in space for the past two decades on a planet peopled (if that's the right word) by aliens who resemble human body parts (tongues, fingers, eyeballs and unidentified pink blobs). As brilliantly weird as ever for Plympton, MUTANT ALIENS is also surprisingly sexy: astronaut Earl's liaison with the fleshy pink alien blob queen shows that even in outer space, love knows no boundaries. Plympton also shares with David Lynch a kind of perverse wholesomeness in his fascination with nostalgic 1950s Americana undercut by a gleefully wicked sense of the bizarre and surreal.