ANI-MOVIES, *The Point

Hippie-strings songwriter Harry Nilson decided to take his 1970 album titled The Punch and make it not only into a musical story, but also as a full-length animated made-for-TV movie. Fred Wolf(best known for later animating the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles)put his production company of Murakami-Wolf Films into making it for ABC in early 1971, which up until then their studio had word on shows like The Flintstones, and several short movies, plus the first Yogi Bear film. The adapting of the album is a profoundly trippy experiences that ranges up on the same level of Yellow Submarine as movies to get stoned by.

Similar to The Princess Bride, the plot is narrated by a father reading a bedtime story to his son. Set in a strange town where everyone has a point on their head, a boy named Oblio is born with a non-pointed head. He wears a pointed cap to fit in, but the spoiled son of the town's Baron looses to him in a ring toss(done with triangles), and gets his father to have Oblio and his loyal dog Arrow banished for being different from everyone else. Oblio travels to a place called the Pointless Forest, and encounters all manner of strange creatures. A living rockman, a walking tree, a trio of bouncing women, and a large bird. The weirdest of them all is the tri-faced Pointed Man, a three-headed mismatched conundrum constantly disregarding everything that Oblio seems to learn from each of his experiences. Oblio eventually comes to the realization that everything in life does have a "point" to it, but doesn't require them to be pointy in appearance. After this epiphany, Oblio and Arrow return to the pointed kingdom and reveal that he had developed an actual point on his head. This causes everyone to suddenly have their heads become rounded, equalizing all the citizens.

The movie features most of the music and several interludes of Harry Nilson's album, most of which serve as a complete break from the narration and turn into their own music numbers, one of which highlights bizarre hybrids of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck with their girlfriend counterparts. Even the movie is intended for children, there's great numbers of inner dialogue that were intended for an older audience. The cast include legendary voice actors like Paul Frees, June Foray, and Lenny Weinrib. The strange thing though is the rotating actors they had doing the voice of the narrator, which first had Dustin Hoffman, and later Alan Thicke. The final video and recent DVD/Blu-Ray release has Ringo Starr filling in the role, which eventually lead the veteran Beatle to doing kids shows like Thomas The Tank Engine. The Point is a artistic but memorable look into American counterculture.