As a "movie" with a "story" it's middling. As an exhibition of Hanna-Barbera's animator's prowess circa the early 80s its stupendous. Very flawed, but also gorgeous, weird, and horny. It's had only sporadic showings over the years and is only available now through uploads on the Internet Archive and similar sites..
From wikipedia: Rock Odyssey was intended as an animated movie by Hanna-Barbera's feature animation division and was meant to air straight-to-television in early 1982. It pairs the rock and roll music of the 50s, 60s, and 70s with animation detailing the life and loves of Laura. It was shelved for five years after Taft Entertainment found it too graphic, during which its director, Robert Taylor, left Hanna-Barbera and its whole feature animation division was closed. (Mr. Taylor previously co-directed the R rated animation, The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat.) It aired internationally in 1987 but would be shown in its original language only a handful of times. It has yet to broadcast in the US.
Notably, there was an animator's strike towards the end of 1982 which concluding with Hanna-Barbera pushing most of its animation out of studio. This film effectively became a last hurrah for its animators.
From myself: Rock Odyssey is full of fantastic, stylish animation that has the vibe and verve of one of the better 80s anime OVAs but with Hanna-Barbera's artistic sensibilities. It's not really explicit but it is adult and horny in a manner that's hard to square with it being cut from the same cloth as The Herculoids.
Plot


Rock Odyssey's story is told completely though visuals, being without dialog. It's also somewhat asynchronous; each decade does have a plot, but it doesn't always go directly from one beat to another.
For the most part the focus is on Laura and her relationships with men, with Laura clearly having a type for tragically doomed bad boys. Billy, her high school romance, has his car totaled and maybe falls into hard drugs. Her second love, Bob, is drafted into the Vietnam war in some of the most affecting moments of the film. She later gets with Jack, who dies saving the whale (singular) in one of the least affecting. Finally, things conclude in the 80s when Laura gets a soul draining corporate job before suffering a midlife crisis and rediscovering The Magic of Rock and Roll (tm) — which for her might be real, genuine sorcery.
The story is perfectly functional, but its unfortunate how sanitized it is. It presents mid-century USA as a time of political unrest, but it only really gestures as what that means. E.g.: Laura and Jack are both protestors in the 60s, but they very pointedly aren't protesting the Vietnam War (even after Jack is drafted). The 70s plot line is fully concerned with a pseudo-Green Peace activism, but it's presented as a conflict between dancing anthropomorphic animals against an evil boat. People of color exist as artists but are otherwise absent. Whatever real struggles are just backdrops for Laura's personal drama.
I don't hold this against the animators, given what it does have (the Vietnam draft) was still enough to scuttle the production.
Visuals


The way Rock Odyssey looks is by far the best thing it has going for it. It's an extremely Hanna-Barbera aesthetic only very well animated and with surprisingly high production values. This ain't The Snorks.
Being without dialog, the animation has to carry a lot of weigh to get the themes and narratives across (such as there are) and for the most part its up to the task. A 50s diner becomes a faux-black and white dreamscape. Laura and Billie's differing backgrounds are shown through their contrasting experiences at a fair ground. Bob's paintings and illustrated children's novel become a setting that Laura explores. Laura and Jack getting sweet together sees them turn into Hummel figurines in a rainbow playground.
It's rarely enough to always know whats happening explicitly, but it works to establish a mood. You know how the characters feel about one another.
Thing do fall into cliche at points. Most of Bob's draft triggered anxiety attacks are appropriately harrowing, but watching ordinary objects turn into weapons reminds me of nothing so much as the ancient gag where a starving shipwrecked sailor hallucinates objects becoming delicious meals. The whole of the 70s is lousy for this, with Laura and Jack's good mannered defense of the whales represented by every sort of sea animal smiling and becoming friends. It's too damn Disney!
(The 70s being so toothless makes it the worst part in the film, even if the 80s has the single worst song.)
Perhaps the most visually interesting choice is how every character is framed like a comic villain. Each of Laura's boyfriends sneers and grimaces. Everyone has underlit eyes. No one is actually evil, they're only drawn that way! Maybe this is the animators leaning on the cliche of how cartoon villains are often considered more attractive than the heroes — or maybe the animators had a type, themselves.
Laura herself is occasionally (and ambiguously) depicted as a sorceress and can be drawn just as wickedly as the men. It's easy to take her magic as just another visual metaphor, but between how fantastic everything else is and the lack of explanatory dialog, there's solid evidence that she just straight up has magic powers. Good for her!
Music


Rock Odyssey is a musical tour of four decades of music. Unfortunately — and this is not really the movies fault — most of the pop music featured in this has never left the air. Elvis's Blue Suede Shoes, The Beatles Help and Yesterday, the Bee Gees Stayin' Alive, — these ain't exactly deep cuts! Instead of being a monument to rock and roll songs of ages long past, Rock Odyssey is more a hagiography to the genre's continued undead-like perpetuation. And you bet your ass the film ends on Old Time Rock and Roll (which I heard on the local oldies station just the other week).
The music often works cross purposes to the animation. The worst moments of the movie are when the narrative is forced to fit the song rather than having the song that fits the narrative. We want to have (an instrumental of) Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze, so lets segue into Laura having a bad trip! We want to use the Hues Corporation's Don't Rock the Boat! so lets put the characters are on a boat and have it rock! We want to use Peggy Lee's I'm a Woman so lets have Laura do a strip dance!
Maybe other animated musicals have original songs for a reason.
Credit where its due, a few bits do wed the animation and the music together quite well (or at least don't have the lyrics direct the animation). The Platters Great Pretender sees Laura and Billy shapeshifting into different forms as they come to know one another. The Supreme's You Keep Me Hangin' On leads in with a chord from the Beatles Help before showing Bob's complete psychological breakdown. Billy Joel's Just the Way You Are is the highlight of the 80s segment with an aesthetic that would be at home in Sonic CD.
Still, there are more misses than hits. That's a shame for something called "Rock Odyssey."
Alas

The copy that is available to watch in English is in poor quality. Evidently it's a 1993 VHS recording of a UK broadcast. It's incredibly that we even have this, but it ain't high definition and it ain't high fidelity.
It's enough to tell that Rock Odyssey is gorgeous, but not quite enough to fully access that beauty. It's kind of heartbreaking!
Everything about this feels like it was precisely calibrated to be the childhood obsession for swathes of preteens. It is positively engineered to be a cultural touchstone for the kids who watched it. But those kids never did because Rock Odyssey was locked away before it was shown. What a damn shame.
