Tetrady not as good as all the hype

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Myron Clemons A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

houseofbliss "Bill Plympton amazes and amuses yet again in his latest feature animation. I kept thinking, while watching the movie unfold, that I was seeing things I'd never seen before...a marvelous mixture of black humor, otherworldly wonder, and pathos. On one level it's a nonstop stream of sight gags which are ingenious and hilarious. But much more than that, they build and build to create a river of escalating tension and action that gushes into a sea of astonishment, ending with an interesting twist, setting up new ideas to imagine after the movie ends.Bill Plympton's work is utterly one-of-a-kind, so I would advise anyone who likes exploring strange new worlds to run and see this one."

Mauricio Silva Barrios It's good to see a different animation. It's well produced, with good shots. Although it has no dialogs, you don't miss them: the movie has a quite good soundtrack, added to the sound design, makes up a good substitute for possible character conversations. The colors and drawings match the story pretty well. The story, although nothing outstanding, is original and develops fine. The beginning of the movie is slow, telling the usual day-to-day of the main character. He has a boring life, and he's a mean person. Then his life changes, and the film gets more dynamic, up to a point where you don't see time passing by. As the movie evolves, so does the character. First his life get some action, then his personality moves off the common selfishness, as if his experiences were enriching his soul. The quality of the animation is far from the best I've seen, but its other characteristics definitely outweigh that.

melloyellobiafra While I have long enjoyed Bill Plympton's short films, I have been left cold by his features. That is until Idiots and Angels came along.The movie is completely free of dialogue and this combined with Bill Plympton's trademark surreal images gives the movie hypnotic quality. I have to say, after all the fuss that was made about the first 30 minutes of the mediocre Wall-E, you would think an animated movie that is without any dialogue at would be declared the greatest thing since sliced bread by the movie going public. Who knows? That may happen, but I doubt it.I'm pretty sure this movie is only playing festivals right now, but, if you have a chance to check it out I highly recommend that you do so.

funkfox In the unit on Self in the Intro Philosophy course that I teach, we talk about the difficulties of imagining the cognition of lesser species, because all animals besides humans don't think in words. This is loosely analogous to seeing a Bill Plympton film, devoid of dialogue as all his works are. For the first 20 minutes, I am enthralled, but by a half an hour in, the continually morphing figures and the animated viscera blur into a soupy blend it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain focus on. I spend the last half of the film slipping in and out of consciousness, enjoying what I see and not all that fussed about missing out on the continuity, because what there is tying the various scenes together is almost entirely subjective anyway.In a way, Plympton's works are immensely impressive, giving one an effect akin to witnessing a 90-minute Salvador Dali painting continually in flux before your eyes. The man undoubtedly has a fertile imagination. Limiting yourself to images only, how do you even plan out a storyline? Does he write out the stories in words and then draw pictures to match the ideas? Or does he just block them out in image-form only? Does he say to himself: "Ok, then the guy morphs into an ant and the ant envisions himself dancing with the lady in the bar, and then the bar turns into a skip being tossed about on the ocean, and then we pan back and we see that the ocean is just inside the man's head"? Or does he just draw it without any explanation and see where it takes him? Perhaps, though, to paraphrase Kierkegaard (or was it Dick Van Patten?), "to define him is to negate him". Just enjoy the visuals - it's a fun ride.