Anomalisa

ANOMALISA

Directors : Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson

Year : 2016

Genre : Animation

Rating : ****

Continuing his exploration of the themes of social isolation, existential angst and identity, writer and director Charlie Kaufman once again delivers another distinct and utterly unique opus in the form of 'Anomalisa', a beautifully designed and ingeniously told stop-motion adaptation of his pseudonymously written "sound play" of the same name.

Sharing directorial credit with stop-motion maestro Duke Johnson ('Mary Shelley's Frankenhole'), Kaufman uses his trademark wit and idiosyncratically strange ideologies to tell the story of the introverted and heavily depressed motivational speaker Michael (voiced by David Thewlis) who, while staying in a Cincinnati hotel on a business trip, engages in an less than friendly phone call with his increasingly wayward wife and son, attempts to rekindle a romance with a bitter ex-girlfriend and falls head over heels in love with Lisa, a young fan (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who has travelled across the States to hear him speak.

Written under the pen name of Francis Fregoli, a surname eluding to the bizarre psychological condition where an individual believes that different people are in fact the same, singular person in disguise , 'Anomalisa' continues Kaufman's recurring obsession with self-absorbtion and the search for oneself - themes he explored to varying degrees in previous works such as the ingenious 'Being John Malkovich' or the bewildering 'Synecdoche New York' and while it may not reach the comedic heights of the former, 'Anomalisa' still contains a great deal of thought-provoking ideas and eye-opening realities.

As was the case with the play, David Thewlis does terrific work bringing the largely unlikable Michael to life. As does Jennifer Jason Leigh who injects her performance as the eponymous Lisa with a great deal of modest vulnerability as well as forceful defiance. However, in a peculiar and, in retrospect, downright brilliant creative choice on Kaufman's part, every other character in the film, whether they be male or female, young or old looks the same and sounds the same ('Manhunter's Tom Noonan providing his unmistakeable tones); an eccentric yet typically Kaufman-esque device to accentuate our crabby protagonists increasingly fractured view of the world - a fracture that is also present in the actual design of the puppets, a distinct break in every one of the characters faces (bought on by the unique "replacement" technique, an incredibly laborious method of stop motion) that lends 'Anomalisa' a striking yet sometimes freakish visual aesthetic.

Much like Michael, 'Anomalisa' is hard to define. On the one hand, it is a wryly comic portrayal of a mans midlife crisis and on the other, it is a dark and sometimes disturbing study of delusional narcissism and selfish insecurity. But as is the case with the best of Charlie Kaufman's work, 'Anomalisa' deftly manages to balance its various disparate elements, creating a deeply profound parable about the folly of self-inflicted paranoia as well as the beauty and mystery of love.