L'Impitoyable Lune de miel !

Plympton is a genius and his film has more imagination than a hundred Hollywood film combined. Nevertheless, this film is a hard one to stick with. Even at an hour and 13 minutes, it feels long.

My objections are not the ones you might expect. I was totally open to Plympton's original and surreal take on life. I wasn't offended at all by the gross or sexual stuff. For the first fifteen minutes or so, Plympton's "anything goes" style of animation is both hilarious and thrilling. Inanimate objects come to life. Bizarre "what if" notions are suddenly played out for us in vivid color. We've entered a new universe.

The first half is very promising. I loved the scene of the main character having a tension filled dinner with his wife and her parents. (The in-law's house includes a framed photo of the young couple, with the son-in-law's image cut out!) These scenes show great promise of a man wrestling with the anxieties most new husband wrestle with (sex, in-laws, life in the 'burbs, balancing a demanding job with a wife who wants attention.) Sadly, the wife and these other elements are almost immediately swept aside so that we can have a series of belabored battles between our hero and the military-entertainment complex. These battles take up the entire second half of the story, and always end in a stalemate.

Plympton's universe, where the laws of physics don't apply and anything can and will happen, is ultimately a mixed blessing. At first, the freedom is funny and liberating. You don't know what's going to happen next. But after half an hour or so, it becomes repetitive and dull. If anything can happen, and no actions have any consequence, then why do we care? Nothing really matters here. Nothing is at stake. No one seems to want anything or care about anything. It's so unreal it ceases to be relevant. Our interest wanes. As cool as Plympton is (and he is cool), at some point the novelty wears off, and when it does, there's nothing to come in and fill the gap (The experience is kind of like that of watching an adult film.)

In the end, IMASP is about nothing but its own cleverness. I hope that for his next project, Plympton will put his considerable talents to work in a good story with strong characters. good story with stron

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'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.

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.

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