For anyone unfamiliar with Bill Plympton's work, his recent short animation, Eat, shown before the main feature fires a warning shot. If you can stomach this, you can cope with Mutant Aliens.

Both pendulum between gratuitous bad taste and a light, lyrical, imaginative, almost Disneyesque quality. Contrast the spaghetti woman on Eat with the ocean of vomit. The yin and yang of Bill Plympton certainly keeps his audience continually surprised.

Mutant Aliens may sound like a bad comic strip, but it has much more to offer. Square-jawed astronaut, Earl Jensen, sets off on a voyage into space, bidding his little girl, Josie, a fond farewell. However, he is barely in orbit before the evil and annoyingly named Dr Frubar (surely that should be Fubar) switches a button which empties Earl's fuel tank. He blames Josie for the mistake and the wide-eyed little girl flies into a rage and bites off Frubar's finger.

Earl's doom seems set and Frubar appeals to America for more money for space research so that men like Earl may not be wasted in space again. Frubar's power grows and he plans the Adship, a massive billboard in space. However, before he can hatch his dastardly plans, Earl returns to Earth with a group of monsters he has created by exposing laboratory pets to radiation. The creatures have been trained over the years to hate Frubar and each has a special, obscene method of dealing with its enemy.

The funniest scenes are the ones which make this an adult cartoon. Josie, who becomes a space scientist, is accosted in the observatory by her rampant boyfriend, Darby. For a moment she resists and two sides of her ego pop up like puppets on her shoulders. While the nun on the left argues with the tart on the right, Darby's erection is represented by every phallic symbol in the book including a chain saw, the Empire State Building, an engine and a volcano.

The tart, grabbing hold of Josie's hair, swings round to the nun knocking her off her perch, but no sooner have the couple got down to it than Josie spots something out of the ordinary on her screen. She dashes outside, Darby (hmmmm, sounds like Barbie) follows at a hop, his trousers still round his ankles.

Sex gets even weirder in space, where we see Earl making love to a giant nose. This planet of body parts is pure surrealism. Dali would have loved it, not to mention Eastern European playwright Gogol, who wrote a play called The Nose early last century, and, of course, the Monty Python team. During a battle where the noses defeat the evil eyes, lips, fingers and tongues, Earl quite literally receives a serious tongue-lashing.

Back on Earth, Frubar makes love to his Adship, watched by salivating advertising men. That he tells the group the screen will be the size of Oregon, reminds us of Plympton's origins. He was born in Portland in 1947, moving to New York in the late Sixties. Even the demure-looking receptionist is sex-obsessed, imagining her hands are the two halves of a horny couple.

Although the slapstick gore can become tedious, especially towards the end, this is not the dull, cold, tedium of a Manga film. Mutant Aliens maintains your interest until the end and even leaves you with a few lingering animated thoughts.