Anomalisa
/david thewlis and jennifer jason leigh
They can tell if you’re smiling even if they can’t see you.
~ Michael Stone
Quick fox: A | Copper
winding dragon
When Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson set out to adapt Kaufman’s 2005 play into a stop-motion animated film, they wanted to create something that would make people forget they were watching animation. And boy did they succeed. Anomalisa (2015) sets a new standard for animated realism, the coarse movements of the puppetry striking an unsettling contrast to the detailed craftsmanship of the world. Perhaps even more important, the style matches perfectly with the film’s melancholic subject matter, which transforms the ordinary into an anomaly.
Depressed doesn’t begin to describe Michael Stone (David Thewlis), customer service expert and best-selling novelist of How May I Help You Help Them? Michael doesn’t have so much a hatred for existence but a great irritation toward it. Anomalisa forces the audience to feel Michael’s irritation—the taxi driver who rambles on about chili and zoo animals, or the hotel concierge who unnervingly never breaks eye contact while typing on a keyboard. But Michael’s irritation stems from everyone’s literal sameness. Every character is voiced by the same person (Tom Noonan) and has the same face that looks doll-like, as if every face is actually an interchangeable part. In a hotel room in Cincinnati, studying his face in the bathroom mirror, Michael suddenly hears a woman’s voice in the hallway. A different voice. He rushes out, banging on hotel doors, until he finds her: Lisa Hesselman (Jennifer Jason Leigh). They spend the evening together, singing Cyndi Lauper and dreaming about the future. Michael calls her an anomaly, his anomaly Lisa, his Anomalisa.
Anomalisa never directly states this, but it’s clear that Michael Stone’s character is based off of the Fregoli Delusion (the hotel’s name is the “Fregoli”), which is a condition where someone believes that other people are just a single person pretending to be everyone else. The movie, though, plays it like a mystery. Artistically, the highly controlled stop-motion suggests that, while it strives to depict extreme realism down to wine bottle labels in the far background, there is something almost sinister about the universe surrounding Michael. On the other the hand, as we get better introduced to Michael, we realize that he could just be suffering from a persecution complex.
Anybody wanting to see Anomalisa should know two things: One, it’s not a film for entertainment. The humor is reserved for situational awkwardness, like much of life seems to be. The movie tries to shock you—a very long and realistically intimate nighttime scene at the top of the list—but in a way to spark an audience’s contemplations on what it means to be an individual. Two, pay careful attention to character’s faces (especially in the last minute) because it often speaks more than what they’re actually saying.
Anomalisa does everything with precision—voice acting, animation, symbolism, and storyboarding all contribute to a fascinating stop-motion experience. It’s a film that doesn’t provide many answers—we never find out why Lisa’s voice is the only one that sounds unique to Michael—but it tells a story with such expression that it makes it better to figure out these problems for yourself. If you do watch it, just be prepared for the most depressing version of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” you’ve ever heard.