Genre: Adventure, Animation, Family, Fantasy
Actor: Alan Thicke, Bill Martin, Buddy Foster, Dustin Hoffman, Joan Gerber, Lennie Weinrib, Paul Frees, Ringo Starr
Director: Fred Wolf
1. The Point, 1971
Making a video for a concept album isn’t particularly new, but you’d be hard pressed to find a feature as whimsical as Harry Nilsson’s The Point. Framed as a fable a father tells his son, The Point takes Nilsson’s psychedelic soundtrack to score a pun-filled fairytale with a seemingly on-the-nose moral, but the combination proves to be charming, as Oblio’s journey unfolds in children’s storybook scrawling and watercolor fills, and expands past the obvious message about acceptance into interesting, if a bit rambling, forays about meaning, power, and community. The Point! is quite obvious, but the film reaches it through surprisingly simple genius.