I don't even know what to say about Popeye. It's definitely one of the strangest films ever made. It's an adaptation of the Popeye comics and cartoons, which I never really enjoyed, and it's clearly faithful to the cartoons in tone and style. It's also a Robert Altman movie, and it's clearly a Robert Altman movie in its tone and style. It just doesn't make any sense how this would work together, and it doesn't.
I always thought that Popeye was pretty boring when I was younger. It's definitely a different style than Warner or Disney cartoons. The cartoons move at a pretty slow pace. There's a lot of build up to jokes and repeated animation. They just felt a lot cheaper than Disney and Warner cartoons (because they were), but they were very popular. I think they haven't really stood the test of time like Looney Tunes, but they remain somewhat popular with a new movie coming in 2016. Altman is incredibly faithful to the cartoon, almost to fault. He mimics how cheap the cartoon felt. Need to animate a village? Let's just show 15 people. Need a bunch of kids? Get 10 random kids, adding the charm of Sweethaven, a town with a crippling street urchin problem for only one scene.
Altman's strange, strange comic book adaptation captures the cartoon's style in a lot of aspects. The acting is all quite strange and animated- which is its intention. It's the closest to live action animation I've seen. However, it's live action cheap animation. Robin Williams and Shelly Duval are excellent, although some of their lines just don't work well in live action. In one scene, Olive Oyl gets scared by the very mention of Rattlesnakes, and hops up onto a rock, where she shrieks "Rattlesnakes! Oh Rattlesnakes! Rattlesnakes!" for at least ten seconds. It's probably one of the most irritating things ever put onto celluloid. I wasn't actually watching it on celluloid. I watched it online, so compared to all of the irritating things put online, it's really not that bad.
I think that rattlesnake scene is a good example of the film's problem, where it fails to be a good Popeye movie or a Altman movie. That scene works in a Popeye cartoon: Olive's shrieking with some goofy old music playing. But here, no music is playing, and it's just Olive's shrieking, made even worse by Altman's characteristically poor sound mixing. At times, the film perfectly matches the style of the Fleischer cartoons and the comic strips, but other times... it's Robert Altman. The film has gritty cinematography and muted colors, incredibly atypical for a cartoon adaptation, and even stranger considering everyone still *is* a cartoon. In the middle, Popeye fights a championship boxer. The color is muted, and it looks like its a scene from a gritty underground boxing movie or something- until you look at Popeye's goofy squint and giant forearms.
The opening is the same way. After opening with an old Popeye cartoon and Popeye announcing that he's in the wrong movie- a pretty cute, though at this point rather lame gag- we get a very Robert Altman opening. When you think Popeye movie, I'm sure you think of an eerie, silent opening of a ship bobbing in the sea, right? That's what I think of! I also think of charming classic Popeye moments like Popeye walking into a whorehouse with an incredibly seedy looking prostitute who's clearly on something strong, crawling around in the corner. I didn't make a word of that up. Popeye actually warns Olive about not getting a venereal disease, I swear to God.
This movie is so pants-on-head crazy, that I didn't even mention the craziest thing about it. That's right, I talked about a Popeye movie for quite some time, and didn't even mention that it's a musical. I guess there were some songs in Popeye, but I only remember the title. I don't think of Popeye as singing. I also don't think of Shelley Duvall singing.
Let's just get this out of the way. I love Harry Neilson. I really do. But these songs are really, really, really horrible. They're probably the worst musical songs I've ever heard. "Everything is Food" is probably one of the downright worst songs I've ever heard. I know some people like this soundtrack. I just can't see how. The songs are mainly the characters saying the same thing again and again and again, with what sounds like a Casio preset playing in the background.I have zero musical talent, and I think I could write the music and lyrics for something pretty similar. I could probably write "I'm Mean" too, although I couldn't sing like Bluto. His voice is pretty awesome. I admire Altman a lot for taping the audio live, but a lot of the time it's just awful. The chorus sounds flat and amateurish. The process does Shelly Duvall no favors at all, and Williams is pretty uninspired as well.
There's a lot to admire in Popeye. Altman was certainly ambitious in handling a comic book and old-time cartoon in a way that mixed his signature style- naturalistic, honest performances, the use of quiet slower moments, and the ensemble cast- with such overtly goofy and over-topic characters and cartoon visuals. That's what makes the movie so strange and sets it apart from literally everything else.
The clash of Altman's and Popeye's original styles just took me out of the movie and just had me constantly questioning what the hell I was watching. However, I think it's worth checking out if you're a fan of Popeye or Robert Altman. Even if you're not particularly fans of either, it's such an oddity that it's worth checking as a total oddity of cinema and the end New Hollywood.
