by Jennifer Watson
I always get excited when I hear of another Charlie Kaufman project, which have ranged from 1999’s peculiar and eccentric Being John Malkovich to 2008’s equally peculiar and eccentric Synecdoche, New York.
Kaufman, whether he’s writing or directing, always manages to achieve a sense of pure creativity through his work that is, at least for me, unparalleled by anyone else in the film industry.
His films are often weird, disturbing, and more often than not, inhabit a world of abstract magical realism where characters can joyride the mind of actor John Malkovich or have all memories of their last relationship permanently erased.
And yet, as his 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind aptly demonstrates, however fantastical Kaufman’s work becomes, it never loses the ability to affect you. His characters, no matter which topsy-turvy worlds they inhabit, offer an emotional truth which cuts straight to the bone.
Never is this more clearly evident than in Anomalisa.
Starting life as a “sound play” which Kaufman wrote under the pseudonym of Francis Fregoli, a reference to a psychological disorder known as The Fregoli Delusion in which a person believes all individuals are in fact the same person, Anomalisa finally became the stop motion animation feature it is today after the film’s budget was raised via Kickstarter.
Kaufman stated his aim was to “produce [a] unique and beautiful film outside of the typical Hollywood studio system where we believe that you, the audience, would never be allowed to enjoy this brilliant work the way it was originally conceived”.
Anomalisa undoubtedly achieves this goal – very few Hollywood studios, if any, would have released something so painfully truthful, and what is in essence, a portrait of existential depression.
The film centres on Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), a motivational speaker who is desperately bored of the seeming mundanity of his life. He believes himself to live in a world of homogeny, a mental state wonderfully realised by one voice actor (Tom Noonan) portraying every other character in the film. That is until Michael meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a fan who has travelled to attend his motivational talk, and suddenly Michael begins to convince himself that this meeting will offer that which he has been relentlessly seeking – something different.
The style of the stop motion animation in the film works incredibly well. Kaufman uses a technique called replacement animation, which involves literally replacing parts of the puppets’ faces between takes. Rather than disguising this technique however, Kaufman emphasises it, retaining the lines of the puppets’ faces where the pieces don’t seamlessly join.
It gives the effect that all the characters are all wearing masks, and are therefore interchangeable. It creates a sense of the uncanny, and whilst darkly comic, the film forces the audience to follow Michael Stone as he descends into something that appears more serious than a simple mid-life crisis.
[imdb id=tt2401878]