I Married a Strange Person!

I feel sorry for the people that said they were bored during this movie and that was the only thing they had to say about it. This movie was a wonderful fantasy in which Plympton used the animated media to its highest potential. This movie does have something to offend just about everyone, from extreme profanity, extreme violence, to bizarre (but funny) sex scenes to quoting Hermann Goring?? The bird sex scene in the opening probably did a good job offending most of the population and let you know there was a really raunchy good time ahead; the facial expressions were great! Another great part to look for is when one character watches the "How To Make Love To A Woman" video. There was one segment I rewound the tape three times and STILL couldn't hear what was said because I was laughing SO HARD! WONderful movie and such an improvement over "The Tune".

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.

This film was one of the best surreal films I actually enjoyed in a long time, great WILD style, love the way he animates the faces to its very creepy but awesome at the same time, I enjoyed the first half better than the last half though.

It seems like an hour and ten mins is very short but like other people said the pacing is a bit over the top I found, the first half kept me purley entertained and never got bored once, but then the last half it felt like there were almost no breaks, it was just a wild rollar coaster until the end which was just as amazing and unique as the first half but its not as powerful because its just so much to take in so fast, it should of had bigger breaks towards the end, one other minor thing irradiated me was how they shoot at the woman and husband at the end point blank range for like 5 minutes and they just dodge them all, I know its not taken seriously but that just felt so dragged out and took away from the overall ending experience.

But thats just the negative, go watch this film IT IS AMAZING its like nothing I have ever seen before, best words to describe it....

Fantasia on speed and acid.

Yes, there are a few dull parts. I will admit that. However, there are also parts that will make you wish you had gone to the bathroom a few minutes ago, before you started laughing so hard that your bladder's about to burst. And then you start thinking about you bladder bursting. And just what it would look like. And you laugh harder. Then you want to go home and check what's really in the back of those wall sockets...

Good movie. Not the greatest in the world, but very good.

Jason

I've been a fan of Bill Plympton's ever since first seeing his Oscar-nominated short "Your Face" about 12 years ago as part of the traveling International Tournee of Animation. Plympton started out as a magazine cartoonist (an early version of "How to Kiss" was published in "Rolling Stone" in the early 80's), and his early short films were based around single gags or concepts. On the basis of these shorts I knew Plympton's animation was kind of primitive, that he had excellent timing, and that he had a flair for metamorphosis and the grotesque that recalled such distinguished predecessors as Otto Messmer and Tex Avery. Unfortunately, I found Plympton's first feature, "The Tune", rather disappointing. The story was weak, and the best parts were the shorts that were incorporated into the feature ("Wiseman", "Push Comes to Shove").

With this in mind, I approached "I Married a Strange Person" with some trepidation. I'd heard some good things about it, and it was such a shock to find it for rent here in Tulsa that I snatched it up right away. It turned out to be a pleasant surprise, so much so that I had a hard time figuring out just what I liked about the movie. All the usual virtues of Plympton's animation are there, and the story starts out nicely enough-a new bridegroom gets zapped in an accident involving a satellite dish and a pair of over-amorous birds, giving him strange and wondrous powers.

What made the story work at first were the appealing characters set within it, the new husband Grant and wife Kerry. Most of the time their actions and reactions were very believable, whether the situation was realistic (the sexual tension between the newlyweds at the beginning-she's in the mood for love, he feels he's got to work overtime to support them) or fantastic (Kerry's alarm, and later anger, when Grant's stray imaginings begin coming to spectacular life). The quality of the animation and design helped, giving depth and texture to Plympton's characteristic style without making it unnecessarily slick. Tom Larson and Charis Michelsen, who voiced Grant and Kerry respectively, deserve considerable credit as well. Maureen McElheron's songs don't hurt either; where much of "The Tune" seemed to be an excuse for the songs, here the songs served the story by setting the mood. I especially liked "Honey How'd You Get So Cute", which (along with Plympton's animation) effectively captured some of the playfully absurd aspects of eroticism.

Unfortunately, the quirky romantic fantasy at the beginning gets shunted aside when an unscrupulous media mogul learns about Grant's new powers and sends a paramilitary squad to capture him. This plot device reminds me of Disney's old comic fantasies-not the animated ones, the live-action ones, the ones with Fred MacMurray or Dean Jones or Kurt Russell as the hero and usually Keenan Wynn as the villain and they also had sentient-or-flying cars or teenaged computers-or-sheepdogs or stuff that bounced higher than the height from which it was dropped. Actually, I dug those films when I was a kid, and I bet Bill Plympton liked them too, but he does little to vary their formula when he applies it here, apart from dollops of sex and violence and a bit of satire.

The plot also threatens to derail the characterizations that were established so well in the first part. Simply, all scenes where the characters' actions follow from their previous behavior work; when a scene doesn't work, it's usually because a character's integrity has been violated for the sake of a gag or the convenience of the plot. I don't know if this means Plympton and/or his collaborator P. C. Vey are still learning how to maintain a story at feature-length, or if they just couldn't resist their impulses to go for quick and dirty laughs, or both.

Nonetheless, despite its flawed or hackneyed aspects, "I Married a Strange Person" is very watchable as a whole film. It is also evidence that Plympton and company have a really great film in them somewhere. Let's hope they put it all together next time.