Brain Pickings

Bill Plympton’s Quirky Animated Guides to Kissing and Making Love

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“Here’s to every him and miss who loves a pure and sunny kiss.”

In 1896, Thomas Edison scandalized society with the very first kiss in cinema. Nearly a century later, in 1989, animation legend Bill Plympton created a charming short film for Rolling Stone, titled How to Kiss, examining with equal parts pragmatism and delightfully violent irreverence the art of the smooch, and laying out the technical components of the different kinds of kisses in his signature colored-pencil technique.

The face is the jewel in the crown of desire.

In 1995, Plympton upped the ante with the equally quirky and much more NSFW How to Make Love to a Woman, an animated guide to “the slippery and challenging path to true [heterosexual] romance”:

For more on and of these classic Plymptoons, see The Complete Early Works of Bill Plympton (1987) and The Classic Works of Bill Plympton (1985).

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