I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Disappointment for a huge fan!

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Genius. Pure, sleight-of-hand-animated, single cel by single celled organ... genius. If only more people could refer to their movies as "labors of love" and truly mean LABOR as in... giving birth. The blood couldn't be more ever-present.Five things for me: the themes of government over individuality (that is to say that money and might makes right), the theory of what I REALLY want to do to my in laws (if I had them), how to hum a happy little tune of some random order all the while, what's really going through a guy's head during sex, and how DID you get to be so cute?Please note that the complexity and intellectuality of the most important things were presented in a descending order. The movie moves a bit more erratically, though with a lot more color and sound.Watch it. If only to say you did. If only to turn to someone else the previous day and say, "I watched this flick last night. I don't know if I'll sleep properly for a week but I've got to own it."It's like being the guy who drinks something out of a cup that's been sitting out for three days, gagging furiously and then looking to your roommate and saying, "Man, this stuff tastes like s#!t. You've got to try it!" Only in a good way. The movie looks gorgeous, is captivating as only lovingly tendered sick humor (with a certain political morality) could be, and is easily one of the most originally sketched visions in motion picture history.Enjoy. Bill Plympton is the man.

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.

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.

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