Anomalisa

	Saturday, April 20th, 2024
      
	Subscribe
	Advertise

Anomalisa

Studio: Paramount
Directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson

Dec 30, 2015 By Austin Trunick Web Exclusive

For the first few scenes of Anomalisa, viewers will likely question just why the film was made using stop motion puppets. (Think: the perennial holiday, like Rudolph, favorites from Rankin-Bass.) It’s relatively low-key, primarily taking place over one 24-hour period at a Cincinnati hotel. Surely, squeezing a few actors and an independent crew into an empty hotel room would have made for an easier filmmaking experience than the famously long and painstaking process of stop motion animation, right? But once your brain clicks with the world’s idiosyncratic wavelengths, you’ll realize it probably couldn’t have been done any other way. After a while, you’ll forget you’re watching puppets at all.

Keeping in mind that Anomalisa was borne from the mind of Charlie Kaufman (Eternal Sunshine, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Synechdoche, New York), you keep waiting for the bottom to drop out of reality—but that moment never comes. That his most grounded movie is the one with puppets is a testament to the film’s brilliance. Anomalisa tears past the artifice to tell one heartbreakingly human story that grapples with the eternal question: is there really someone out there for everyone?

www.anomalisa.com