Despite the facts, master-genius Charlie Kaufman’s new film Anomalisa is not wholly original.
Sure, you have never seen anything like it. The film is the most personal and intimate animated film I have ever seen. The scope is remarkably small and the vocal performances are so genuine and nuanced they deserve award nominations.
Despite this uniqueness, the themes will be familiar for any Kaufman fan. One man alienated in his own mind, unable to make connection with fellow humans, struggles to find meaning in the sea of faces around him. Same ideas fondled with remarkable results in Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Synecdoche, New York and nearly every other screenplay the tortured man produces.
I compare the sameness in the chaos to Radiohead; they sound like no other but they have their sound.
Anomalisa is a true anomaly: a sui generis familiar. And it is that contradiction that makes this a cinematic dream that must be seen to be believed.
The stop-motion animation is a marvel to look at and gives the film an almost unsettling quality. Based on a play [that Kaufman penned under the name Francis Fregoli], the scenes are deceptively pedestrian, focusing on the words and making the idea to animate even more confounding. We are all puppets? Anomalisa requires multiple viewings as I am not nearly smart enough to decipher all the meaning in a single viewing.
I found the film haunting, stuck in my brain for days, running the parallels of Michael Stone’s life to my own. A beautiful nightmare of disconnect that demands your thought and attention.
