The Point (1971)

A real oddity from the early 70s, still fondly remembered and much-loved, perhaps due in part to its Beatles connections. Based on a an album of the same name by Harry Nilsson (a long-time John Lennon associate), it's an animated made-for-TV "fable" which bears more than a passing resemblance to the feature film Yellow Submarine (1968) and, in its later incarnations, it featured a narration by Ringo Starr, warming up perhaps for his stint as the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine on TV.

Beautifully animated in eye-searing psychedelic tones by a team that included prolific small screen animators Fred Wolf and Jimmy T. Murakami, The Point is a simple and idealistic but nonetheless effective plea for tolerance and understanding dressed up in dayglo colours, extraordinary design and unexpected plot twists and turns, peppered with plentiful excellent Nilsson songs along the way.

The peculiar plot charts the journey of young Oblio (voiced by Mike Lookinland, familiar to TV viewers as Bobby Brady from The Brady Bunch (1969-1974)), a child with a round head in a society where everyone else has, by law, a pointed head, who is cast out of his village at the behest of an evil Count and banished to the much-feared Pointless Forest. There he meets a string of bizarre characters (among them The Pointed Man, The Rockman and The Leafman) before coming to the conclusion that everything and everyone has a point even if at first they seem not to and returning to change the Pointed Village forever.

Nilsson never made any bones about the lysergic source for his fantasy, noting that "I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, 'Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn't, then there's a point to it'"[1]. And director Wolf and his team were clearly on the same wavelength and went to town with the wild, hallucinatory imagery, even outdoing the trippy weirdness of Yellow Submarine. Even if the message may seem a little too blunt and on-the-nose, there's so much to enjoy in the constantly surprising parade of psychedelic visuals that it's impossible not to find The Point endlessly fascinating.

If there's a fault to be found with The Point it is that the underlying messages - worthy though they undoubtedly are - are rather unsubtly conveyed and often seem wincingly idealistic. Like so much of the hippy inflected idealism of the time, it's hard not to agree that Nilsson has, if you will, a point, but he tends to hammer it home as though he's just discovered some extraordinary cosmic truth when in fact he's just stumbled upon the obvious thanks to a copious ingestion of acid.

That aside, The Point remains a remarkable piece of work, all the more so when one considers that it was first shown on prime-time television. It physically hurts trying to imagine anyone, least of all one of the major networks, attempting to palm off anything quite as odd as The Point in prime-time today.

When it first aired, the voice of the storytelling father was that of Dustin Hoffman but contractual problems prevented further screenings with that narration so The Point when through an extraordinary series of reworkings. Although the visual components have thankfully remained consistent, the narration has been revoiced by Alan Barzman (for further TV screenings), Alan Thicke (for a version seen on US cable TV during the 80s) and finally by Starr, whose tones grace most subsequent VHS and DVD releases.

NOTES
1. Quoted by Alan Jacobson in his review of The Point in Bright Lights Film Journal no.44 (May 2004).