The movie starts slow. But that might be intentional. The first few scenes are dull enough that there is downtime to really appreciate the strangeness of these ‘characters.’ They are puppets without strings, smooth and felty. Their hands don’t have nails, and their faces are spookily segmented by independently moving plates. They are, quite simply, galvanizing.
Anomalisa is a stop-motion film by co-director Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the screenplays for quirky films Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. It is animation, but about as far from Wallace and Gromit as 9½ Weeks is from Bambi. No, this is most definitely an adult—nay, mature—film, highly sophisticated in its subject matter.
In a nutshell, a married man goes away on business and has an affair. But there is depth here, and broad emotional range. The man is empty, disenchanted by the sameness of his life (this is emphasized by the fact that all the characters except the woman he hooks up with have the same man’s voice, females included). But he receives a jolt to the senses when he meets a woman with the voice of an angel (Jennifer Jason Leigh). She sings a Cyndi Lauper song to him, and he—in raptures—takes her to bed. What follows is a sex scene of the most excruciatingly intimate kind, only really possible (outside the porn genre) because they are puppets. In fact, its intimacy is such it had some members of the audience squirming with mirth (or awkwardness.)
The whole process took three years and progressed at a rate of one second a day. It has already received an Oscar nomination for best animated feature.
Should You See It? Absolutely. Movies like this don’t come around often. (But don’t take Grandma.)
Viewed at Landmark Tivoli Theatre
