After fair-to-middling results in ´14 and ´15, this year's film output is starting to present itself of different ilk, and Anomalisa is an unexpected and welcome addition to the vintage.
Anomalisa is the 2nd feature film co-directed by Charles Kaufman, renowned mostly as writer of a roster of bizarre and occasionally pretentious scripts for films that hit (Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, George Clooney, 2002) as often as they miss (Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze, 1999) and the 1st co-directed by up-and-coming stop-motion animation director Duke Johnson, hitherto confined to shorts and TV efforts.
Anomalisa tells the story of burnout middle aged motivational speaker Michael Stone (David Theulis), in Cincinnati overnight for a conference where he's fated to churn out the usual platitudes, happens to stumble into an hotel bar one night stand worthy of Philip Larkin's “Is It for Now or for Always?” with plain girl next door Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Casual love with a distinct promise of redemption arises, as Lisa is the only person Michael hears with an individual, and feminine, voice. To him, everybody else sounds the same (voiced by Tom Noonan). And, like him and Lisa, everybody in the film has face consisting of a mask apparently removable from the lower eyelid down through the jaw. Yes. And the film is in stop-motion animation.
Anomalisa is amazing. The shy and tentative first time lovemaking interjected with “sorry” and “that's OK” by both parties is the best ever in stop-motion porn and way beyond yonder. Anomalisa brought to my mind an old interview with Georges Franju. Asked why he directed Le Sang des Bêtes (1949) in black and white, he replied that in colour it would have probably been unbearable. Asked then why film an abattoir at all, he replied “parce que ç'est beau, parce que moi, je trouve que tout est beau”. Remarks that apply mutatis mutandis to Anomalisa, the 1st R rated animation feature to be nominated for an Oscar (not that it matters). The love scene referred to above is obviously the central scene of the film, like in every other film ever made, but the run up and aftermath are equally mesmerizing.
I hope I have impressed my admiration for Anomalisa sufficiently. I'll just add one thing: film buffs, noses decades relentlessly close to the grinding stone of the silver screen (this is possibly my worst metaphor ever) inevitably develop that most deplorable of diseases: detachment. You've seen it all 100 times over and everything is enjoyable if and only as referent to or reminiscent of a 100 others. Anomalisa was the 1st film in many a year to hold my attention almost throughout with a permanent unguarded feeling of “what the…?”. Like Lisa and Michael's one-night-stand, I know I can't have it back, but I'm happy it happened.