`Strange Person': Bill Plympton's Latest Toon Is Out Of Tune

Movie review XX "I Married a Strange Person," feature-length cartoon produced, directed and animated by Bill Plympton. 74 minutes. Varsity. No rating; includes profanity, cartoon nudity.

Bill Plympton's surreal style has become as recognizable as Fellini's. He may never be as famous, but in the cartoon world this Oregon-raised animator has established himself as inimitable.

His latest handmade feature, "I Married a Strange Person," which was produced for $200,000 and required 30,000 drawings (all done by him), is in many ways a typical Plymptoon, filled with images that carry a certain queasy/dreamy logic. It's just a little crasser than anything he's done before.

You may get a bad vibe from the opening credits, in which Plympton quotes Picasso: "Ah, good taste, what a dreadful thing." This is followed by a credits sequence in which two ducks, copulating in flight, crash into a satellite dish, somehow electrifying a yuppie hunk, radiating his brain and alienating him from his bewildered bride.

The dim young husband discovers he has a kind of Midas touch: He can turn his thoughts into reality, and soon he's transforming his horrified wife into several other women (not to mention a rabbit and a robot) while they're sharing a bed.

"When we have sex, I want you to have it with me alone," she protests. To no avail. Her mother, who disapproves of the marriage, is soon plagued by bugs that infest her eyes and ears, while her

foul-mouthed father's head becomes a music box. The wife starts to wonder: Has she married the anti-Christ, the Messiah, a robot or (to borrow another movie's title) a monster from outer space?

The plot seems made to order for Plympton, who thrives on contortionist humor. Once more, he turns noses, ears and lips into infinitely flexible elements, tying them up in knots, punching holes in them, then somehow reconstituting them. Long before it became popular in live-action movies, morphing faces was Plympton's specialty.

Unfortunately, he doesn't so much develop his story as repeat the notion that the husband's id is on the loose, and the lowest-common-denominator jokes get out of hand. Could this be the influence of MTV, where Plympton's cartoon shorts now turn up most frequently?

With its images of copulating tanks and belching opera singers, "I Married a Strange Person" seems made-to-order for the next "Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation," and will probably be most welcome there.

But it lacks the genuine visual wit that earned Plympton an Oscar nomination for "Your Face" (1987) and a Cannes Film Festival prize for "Push Comes to Shove" (1991). Juvenile and ultimately exhausting, it's too much of a once-good thing.