I Married a Strange Person!

I caught this movie by accident at 2am and found it highly entertaining. It dashes from one scene to the next at a rate of knots. The animation is good and it is very refreshing to see an adult oriented cartoon despite the bizarre nature of the story. I'll be watching out for more by Bill Plympton in the future.

After newlywed businessman Grant Boyer is electrocuted by his satelite dish, he develops a strange lump on the back of his neck that gives him the power to bring his crazy thoughts and fantasies into reality. Of course, since this is a Plympton film, you can safely assume that this is merely an excuse to load the movie with lots of blood, sex, talking animals, bulging eyeballs, and more detached limbs than you can count. While extremely imaginative, well-animated, and generally fun to watch, the film runs its course within the first half-hour or so. Plympton is an amazing artist, but his art is best viewed in short-film form.

Bill Plympton's feature-length cartoon is about how Our Hero gets a boil in his neck that permits him to change things into other things. Because he is newly married, this upsets his bride (even though the sex is great), and she rushes home to her parents. Meanwhile, the CEO of minor TV network Smilecorp hears of this ability and orders its military division to seize the person, or at least the boil, using all sorts of armaments.

At this point, the story, such as it is, loses any sign of coherence; with the ability to change anything into anything else, how can it be otherwise? Still, there are some fine Plympton gag sequences, and the animation is a little fuller than it usually is for his work; apparently he got more money for this production than usual.

None of which serves to make it a great cartoon. Although the gimmick suits Plympton's wild sensibilities, the open-ended nature of it seems to have overwhelmed the film maker.

I've always found Plympton's animations intriguing (and at times a bit disgusting, but I mean that in the nicest possible way). I agree with other reviewers on this page that Plympton's style may not be too well-suited for a full-length movie, as I was quite bored at regular intervals. However, if you're into his style and sense of humour (which means that you don't mind gratuitous violence and sex scenes) you should get a kick out of this one. I found myself laughing out loud a couple of times (for instance, at the sex/balloon animals scene), and any movie that makes you do that deserves a pat on the back :).

I've been a fan of Bill Plympton since I first saw one of his shorts in a late-80s animation festival, and to me, "I Married a Strange Person!" is his best work. It's possible that I've missed something better -- I've seen many/most of his shorts, but only one other of his long-form works, "The Tune". This film, to me, is much funnier and more memorable than "The Tune", though not as deep, I suppose.

Fans of the "splatstick" horror/comedy genre should enjoy this film, as it uses over-the-top gore to similar comedic effect. Don't get the impression that this is a film in the vein of "Lupo The Butcher" or something, though, with ultra-violence being used for ultra-violence's sake. Plympton's imagination is FAR too vivid for that to be the case.

I'd have to say, in fact, that Plympton has the most unique and active imagination of any visual artist I'm familiar with, and this film is a great showcase for it, since the plot concerns a special brain lobe that causes imagination to become reality.

Apart from the comedic gore, there are hilarious looks at sex. What Plympton has done for quitting smoking and other topics in his shorts, he does here for sex. Everything from people to animals to inanimate objects are seen engaging in the act here, to comic effect. One of the most imaginative images is the upper receptacle in an electrical outlet banging the lower receptacle from behind (with the three-prong receptacles having become faces).

Another thing to mention is the film's great score. Funny, catchy, toe-tapping tunes that you'll feel like you've heard somewhere before.

To sum up, buy this film! If you're at all a fan of animation or semi-risque comedy, you're sure to love it.