Puppets tell a human story in Anomalisa
NEW YORK — Painstakingly crafted over more than three years with occasional appeals for crowdsourced financing, the stopmotion animated film Anomalisa was, ironically, the easy movie for screenwriter Charlie Kauffman.
“I had been sort of going through a tough time for several years trying to get things going,” says Kauffman, the writer of funny, melancholy meta movies such as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. “So the idea that this was going to get going didn’t seem realistic to me. The funny thing is, this was easier than anything I’ve tried to get made since 2008 because it actually happened.”
Kauffman had reason to be skeptical. He wrote Anomalisa as a radio play for the stage, with just sounds and dialogue. Starburns Industries, a stop-motion animation outfit formed for a special for the TV series Community, approached Kauffman in 2011 about turning it into an animated movie.
Never one to be overly opti- mistic, Kauffman went along, doubtfully. “I wasn’t against it,” he says. Duke Johnson, who helmed the Community episode, came aboard as director. While Kauffman struggled to find traction for his other projects, the slow toil of stop-motion proceeded. (Such is the pace that there aren’t dailies but “weeklies.”)
The resulting film is one of the most original movies of the year, a regular of top-10 lists (including this writer’s) and year-end honours. After its enthusiastic festival debut, it was picked up by not some indie label, but Paramount Pictures.
Made entirely with puppets, Anomalisa is about a lonely man (David Thewlis) on a business trip away from his family. He’s a star of customer service whose disillusionment with life has gone so far that everyone he encounters appears the same to him. Actor Tom Noonan voices every other character but one: a homely young woman named Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who stands out to him: an anomaly.
Anomalisa is a rare exception, itself. In a culture that often drifts toward uniformity, Anomalisa is uncommonly human, written by one of movies’ great enemies of conformity. It can be staggering to see emotions and interactions (even sex), rendered more familiarly with puppets in miniature hotel rooms, taxis and bars than most live-action movies even dare.
“I’ve struggled with it my whole life, the bull---- of the worlds that are presented to us that are unlivable or unattainable. It adds to a lot of depression and unhappiness and alienation that people feel,” Kauffman says. “The only way I know how to fight that is to just represent in my work myself or my thoughts, my worries, my feelings. If you show yourself and somebody else feels connected to that, then they’re connected to something that’s real.
“When I have that experience watching other people’s work, it makes me feel relieved.”
Kauffman, 57, arguably the most renowned screenwriter of a generation, and Johnson, a 36year-old up-and-coming filmmaker, don’t share a sensibility so much as an eagerness to ignore, subvert and distort convention.
Whereas most animation is compelled by fantasy, Johnson was excited by the mundane of Anomalisa. Most are scenes that would never be animated, like an eight-minute phone call made from a hotel bed.
“That’s, like, the first thing in the textbook of things you do not animate,” Johnson says. “And that took months to do.”
But stop-motion, in particular, has its own unique qualities, Johnson adds, with its own mood, with real spaces, light and gravity.
“We did the opposite of things you normally do with animation,” Kauffman says.
“We kept things like breaths and all the sort of overlapping that the voices do.”
It was a new world for Kauffman, but he’s well acquainted with the wry backdrop of customer service in the film.
When he was younger, he had jobs answering phones about wet papers and missing sections for the Minneapolis Star Tribune and selling tickets for the Metropolitan Opera.
He also worked in a book warehouse and was a doorman for an apartment building.
“Nobody was seeing anybody,” he says, recalling the impersonal nature of those jobs.
It’s easy to see in Kauffman’s movies a great fear of homogeneity: Malkovichs everywhere, Noonan’s voice all around. His movies are radical, heartfelt exceptions to the perceived rules. Kauffman, who has sought to direct again after 2008’s Synecdoche, New York, is currently working on a novel, as well a rewrite for a studio.
“The idea that Adaptation was made by Sony is the thing I think about,” he says. “That is a movie that would never be made by a studio now. They just wouldn’t. It wouldn’t occur to them. And I’ve had people at the studios say to me: ‘I’m sorry to say this, but we need to know what the commercial is.’ ”
And yet it was a studio that came calling once Anomalisa became a hot property on the festival circuit, a surreal ending to a quixotic project.
“There’s always people saying: You can’t do this. We came up against it in this a lot,” Kauffman says. “The answer is always: Why can’t you do this?”