Amazon.com
Because two copulating birds bash into his satellite dish, the blandly handsome Grant develops godlike powers. When he and his new bride Kerry have sex, the entire house joins in, from the soap dish to the electric sockets. Grant manipulates her breasts to form balloon animals; he changes her into a blonde, then a nun, then the Statue of Liberty. Basically, he's become an animator like his creator Bill Plympton, able to make the world reflect his every id-driven whim. Is it any wonder that Kerry begins to question if Grant is still the same straight-up guy she married? Plympton's new animated movie,
I Married a Strange Person!, opens with a quote from Picasso: "Ah, good taste, what a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativity." Plympton has taken this perhaps a little too much to heart, but with a good dose of sprightly charm. Plympton's drawing style vibrates, shimmies, and pops with boyish cheer. The movie is regularly punctuated with breezy songs that you'd imagine sound great on a ukulele, sung by some guy in a straw boater. Over-the-top sex and violence and crazed excursions into the origin of belly-button lint combine to produce a weird, sparkling movie.
I Married a Strange Person! is clearly the pure product of Plympton's imagination, without any meddling from studio executives.
--Bret Fetzer
Bill Plympton's special brand of dementia-faces imploding, elongated tongues wrapping around heads, cigarettes being smoked from every orifice-has been a staple of animation festivals for the past ten years. Here he stretches out to feature length, and the results are mixed. The plot kicks off with a freak accident involving orgasmic birds, a satellite dish, and a guy named Grant, who suddenly gains the power to make his every weird thought take shape; in other words, he turns into an animator. A battle with a power-mad television mogul ensues, and it's not very interesting. But along the way, the Plympton trademarks-fine drawing, unexpected perspectives, inspired perversions bursting through a civilized veneer-are on gross, glorious view. There's a great sequence in which Grant and his wife are having sex, and their house and everything in it-the flower and the vase, the comb and the brush, the wing tip and the pump-get it on in sybaritic sympathy. -Ken Marks
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker