THE POINT DIRECTED AND ANIMATED BY FRED WOLF BMG DISTRIBUTION WHAT ONCE SEEMED ...

DIRECTED AND ANIMATED BY FRED WOLF BMG DISTRIBUTION

WHAT ONCE SEEMED a trite chunk of cartoon storytelling about the ills of prejudice—a round-headed boy gets alienated from his pointier community—suddenly and honestly feels fresher now than how I remember this movie as a kid. In 1971, Fred Wolf's characters and their motivations—Oblio and his romp through the Pointless Forest—felt like an overly earnest film form, an after-school special whose soft palette's colors was drippy and runny. All I could like was screenwriter/composer Harry Nilsson's score—and even that was limited to the tune, "Me and My Arrow."

Yet now it's easier to see the dearness and compassion built up by Wolf (a man who has had a history of lame animation, what with stuff like The Adventures of the American Rabbit) toward a boy who is ostracized. Maybe Wolf's watery tones were necessary to show an outcast Oblio isolated from his angular community-at- large with only his prickly pooch to guide him. And maybe those runny colors worked best with Nilsson's own cleverly Beatles-esque oom-pah-loomp-ah-ing songs like "P.O.V. Waltz." I think my heart has warmed to The Point because we know that, in retrospect, Nilsson and his film's narrator, Ringo Starr, in 1971, were red-wine drunkards and coke fiends. That I can appreciate.