Anomalisa

Anomalisa
Theatrical release poster
Directed by
Produced by
Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
Based on Anomalisa
by Francis Fregoli
Starring
Music by Carter Burwell
Cinematography Joe Passarelli
Edited by Garret Elkins
Production
company
Distributed by Paramount Pictures
Release date
Running time
 90 minutes[1]
Country United States
Language English
Budget $8 million[2]
Box office $5.7 million[2]

Anomalisa is a 2015 American stop-motion animated comedy-drama film directed and produced by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson. Kaufman adapted the screenplay from his 2005 audio play Anomalisa, written under the pseudonym Francis Fregoli. It was released on December 30, 2015, by Paramount Pictures. The film follows a lonely customer service expert (voiced by David Thewlis) who perceives everyone (all voiced by Tom Noonan) as identical until he meets a unique woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in a Cincinnati hotel.

Anomalisa was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (the category's first ever R-rated nominee), a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film, and five Annie Awards. It became the first animated film to win the Grand Jury Prize at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, after premiering at the Telluride Film Festival on September 4, 2015.[3]

Plot

In 2005, customer service expert Michael Stone travels to Cincinnati, Ohio to promote his latest book at a convention in a hotel. He is distant from everyone around him, whom he perceives as having an identical face and voice, including his wife and son. Michael practices his talk in his hotel room, but is haunted by the memory of an angry letter from his old flame, Bella, whom he abruptly left years ago. He arranges to meet her in the hotel bar; still angry, she is outraged by his invitation to his room and storms out. Going for a walk, Michael mistakes an adult toy store for a children's toy store and tries to buy something for his son, but is fascinated by a Japanese animatronic woman.

After taking a shower, Michael hears a female voice. He rushes from his room to find its owner: an insecure young woman named Lisa Hesselman attending Michael's talk with her friend. Enraptured by her unique appearance and voice, he invites both women for drinks at the bar. Afterwards, to Lisa's surprise, Michael invites her to his room. Despite her claims that she is not special, Michael finds her captivating, admiring the facial scar she conceals with her hair. He encourages her to sing Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" and tell him about her life. Declaring her an "anomaly", he nicknames her "Anomalisa". They become intimate and have sex.

Michael has a nightmare in which his face falls apart and the identical people of the world pursue him, claiming they love him and that he and Lisa cannot be together. The dream inspires Michael to propose that he and Lisa run away and start a new life. She agrees, but her eating habits during breakfast annoy him, and her voice and face begin to transform into everyone else's. During his convention talk, he suffers a breakdown, confessing that he has no one to talk to and ranting about the American government, alienating the audience.

Michael returns to his Los Angeles home. He gives his son the Japanese animatronic woman as a gift, which nonplusses him. Michael's wife has arranged a surprise party, but he is unable to recognize any of the attendees, angering her. Michael sits alone on the stairs as the animatronic woman sings "Momotarō's Song", a Japanese children's song. Lisa writes a letter to Michael, saying she hopes they will meet again. Lisa's friend, sitting beside her in the car, has her own face.

Cast

  • David Thewlis as Michael Stone, an author and a customer-service expert with a mostly negative attitude. To him every person sounds the same except for Lisa who he perceives to be different.
  • Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lisa Hesselman, an insecure, lovely, and sweet woman who came to the hotel to attend Michael's talk about customer service.
  • Tom Noonan as everyone else.

Production

Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson at the 2015 Fantastic Fest

Anomalisa was written in 2005 for the Los Angeles run of "Theater of the New Ear", described as "a concert for music and text, or a set of 'sound plays'" by Carter Burwell, who commissioned and scored them.[4] It was a double bill with Kaufman's Hope Leaves the Theater, and replaced Sawbones, by the Coen Brothers, from the earlier New York run after that play's actors were unavailable.[5] Anomalisa was credited to the pen name Francis Fregoli: a reference to the Fregoli delusion, a belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise.[6] The 2005 performance had Thewlis and Leigh sitting on opposite sides of the stage, with Noonan in the middle; Burwell conducted the Parabola Ensemble, and there was a foley artist.[4][7]

Kaufman was initially opposed to turning the play into an animated film, saying that the play had "a disconnect between what's being said on stage and what the audience is seeing – there's Tom playing all these characters, there's Jennifer and David having sex while they're really just standing across the stage from each other and moaning. You'd lose that". The film was reinvented, although its script was described by The Guardian as "virtually the same" as that of the original play.[8]

The film raised its budget on Kickstarter so as to "produce this unique and beautiful film outside of the typical Hollywood studio system where we believe that you, the audience, would never be allowed to enjoy this brilliant work the way it was originally conceived". Pitched as a short film "approximately 40 minutes in length", 5,770 backers pledged $406,237 to help bring the project to life.[9] After the success of the Kickstarter initiative, additional funding was secured by the film's production company, Starburns Industries, and the film was expanded to a feature length.[10]

Animation

The puppets were created with the use of 3D printers,[11] with multiple copies of each character. Eighteen Michaels and six Lisas were created.[12] While Johnson was told that such realistic animation would be "disturbing and off-putting", he disagreed.[8] To that end, a goal of the film was for viewers to "forget they were looking at something animated and just get wrapped up in the scene", further explaining that "the challenge we felt with so much animated stuff is that you're always conscious of the animation, and we kept asking, 'What if we could escape that? What would it be like?'".[11] Both Kaufman and Johnson have described the process of stop-motion animation as "laborious" and found challenges in making the puppets look lifelike and relatable.[13] Animator Dan Driscoll explains the process as starting with finding people on whom to model the puppets, studying human movement and facial expressions in order to produce a precise result, then creating the puppets and building the sets and, finally, placing the puppets on the sets and moving them frame by frame in order to create the illusion of movement.[13] Kaufman iterates that the medium of stop motion serves as underpinning of the narrative of Anomalisa as it draws attention to the small details that viewers would otherwise not notice in live-action film.[14]

The film was in production for more than two years.[12]

Release

Anomalisa had its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on September 4, 2015.[15] The film went on to screen at the Venice Film Festival on September 8, 2015.[16] and the Toronto International Film Festival on September 15, 2015.[17] Shortly after, it was announced Paramount Pictures had acquired worldwide distribution rights to the film.[18] The film was released in a limited release on December 30, 2015.[16] A wider release followed in January.[19]

The film's DVD and Blu-ray packs were released on June 7, 2016.[20] The Blu-ray Combo Pack with Digital HD includes an in-depth look at the filmmaking process with Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson. As well as that, it also includes three behind-the-scenes features, including an extended look at the production process and deeper themes of the story. Furthermore, specific looks of the sound design and the ground-breaking techniques used to create one of the most intricate and intimate scenes from the film are also shown.[21] In the Blu-ray pack, thanks to the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 used in the film's production, ambient sound effects such as the hotel bar background can be perfectly heard and combined with the dialogue.[22]

Critical response

Rotten Tomatoes reports a 93% approval rating for the film based on 251 reviews; the average rating is 8.4/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Anomalisa marks another brilliant and utterly distinctive highlight in Charlie Kaufman's filmography, and a thought-provoking treat for fans of introspective cinema."[23] The film also holds an 88 out of 100 weighted average rating on Metacritic based on 46 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[24]

Writing for Time Out and awarding the film five out of five stars, David Calhoun wrote, "It's what you imagine might have happened if Charlie Kaufman had got his hands on Up in the Air or Lost in Translation."[25] Drew McWeeny of Hitfix called it "the most shattering experiment yet from Charlie Kaufman" and graded it an "A+".[26] LA Weekly's Amy Nicholson gave the film an "A" and wrote that "Kaufman is taking our brains apart and showing us the gears."[27] The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave the film five out of five, naming it his film of the week, and wrote: "It is really funny, and incidentally boasts one of the most extraordinarily real sex scenes in film history. It also scared me the way a top-notch horror or a sci-fi dystopia might ... Is there anyone else in the movies doing such unique and extraordinary work?"[28]

Observer critic Mark Kermode gave Anomalisa three out of five, writing: "Sometimes it falls apart ... But there’s something magical about the malaise which raises this above mere misanthropy – a heightened sense of fragile life that perhaps only puppets could hope to achieve."[29] Stephanie Zacharek of TIME wrote: "Once you start reckoning with Anomalisa's obsession with self-absorption, the novelty of this one-man pity party begins to wear off."[30]

Top ten lists

Anomalisa was listed on numerous critics' top ten lists for 2015.[31]

Accolades

Award Category Recipient Result
Academy Awards Best Animated Feature Film Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson, and Rosa Tran Nominated
Golden Globe Awards Best Animated Feature Film Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson
Golden Reel Awards[32] Best Sound Editing: Sound Effects, Foley, Dialogue & ADR in an Animation Feature Film Aaron Glacock, Christopher S. Aud, MPSE
Critics Choice Awards Best Animated Feature Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson
Annie Awards Best Animated Feature Rosa Tran, Duke Johnson, Charlie Kaufman and Dino Stamatopoulos
Best Directing in a Feature Production Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson
Best Music in a Feature Production Carter Burwell
Best Voice Acting in a Feature Production Jennifer Jason Leigh
Best Editing in a Feature Production Garret Elkins
Austin Fantastic Fest Best Director Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman Won
Fantastic Features
Independent Spirit Award Best Feature Nominated
Best Director Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson
Best Screenplay Charlie Kaufman
Best Supporting Female Jennifer Jason Leigh
American Cinema Editors Best Edited Animated Feature Film Garret Elkins
Mill Valley Film Festival Audience Award Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson Won
Toronto Film Critics Best Animated Film Runner-up
Venice Film Festival Grand Special Jury Prize Won
Future Film Festival Digital Award
Golden Lion Nominated
Green Drop Award
Austin Film Critics Association Awards Best Film
Best Animated Film
Top 10 Best films 4th Place
Alliance of Women Film Journalists Awards Best Depiction of Nudity, Sexuality, or Seduction David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh (tied with Carol) Won
Best Animated Film Nominated
Village Voice Film Poll Best Animated Film Anomalisa 2nd Place
Best Film Nominated
Best Screenplay 4th Place
Satellite Awards Best Animated or Mixed Media Film Nominated
Saturn Awards[33] Best Animated Film

Soundtrack

Anomalisa (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Soundtrack album / Film score by Carter Burwell
Released January 1, 2016
Recorded 2015
Genre Soundtrack
Length 43:53
Label Lakeshore Records
Producer Carter Burwell
Carter Burwell film scores chronology
Legend
(2015)		 Anomalisa (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
(2016)		 The Finest Hours
(2016)

All tracks by Carter Burwell, except when mentioned:[34]

  1. "Overture"
  2. "Welcome to the Fregoli"
  3. "Cin Cin City"
  4. "Another Person"
  5. "None of Them Are You" - lyrics by Charlie Kaufman
  6. "Fregoli Elevator"
  7. "Lisa in His Room"
  8. "Anomalisa"
  9. "Cincinnati Sunrise"
  10. "My Name Is Lawrence Gill"
  11. "Breakfast with Lisa"
  12. "Michael's Speech"
  13. "Goddess of Heaven"
  14. "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" – lyrics and music by Robert Hazard

References

  1. ↑ "ANOMALISA (15)". British Board of Film Classification. January 25, 2016. Retrieved January 25, 2016.
  2. 1 2 "Anomalisa". Box Office Mojo. IMDb. Retrieved February 21, 2016.
  3. ↑ "Official Awards of the 72nd Venice International Film Festival". Venice International Film Festival. Archived from the original on February 19, 2017. Retrieved February 10, 2017.
  4. 1 2 "Theater of the New Ear". Carter Burwell official website. Retrieved April 4, 2016.
  5. ↑ Swed, Mark (September 16, 2005). "Lend an ear to Charlie Kaufman". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved April 4, 2016.
  6. ↑ Lawless, Jill (September 9, 2015). "Charlie Kaufman wows Venice critics with inventive adult animation 'Anomalisa'". U.S. News and World Report. Retrieved September 17, 2015.
  7. ↑ Gallo, Phil (September 15, 2005). "Review: Theater of the New Ear". Variety. Penske Business Media. Retrieved April 4, 2016.
  8. 1 2 Rommey, Jonathan (September 15, 2015). "Charlie Kaufman on weirdness, failure and his new puppet noir". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Retrieved September 17, 2015.
  9. ↑ Starburns Industries. "Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa". Kickstarter. Retrieved June 11, 2018.
  10. ↑ Starburns Industries (May 22, 2014). "Kickstart Update #39: Anomalisa Timeline". Kickstarter. Retrieved June 11, 2018.
  11. 1 2 Zeitchik, Steven (September 4, 2015). "Charlie Kaufman breaks hiatus on own terms in 'Anomalisa' at Telluride". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved September 17, 2015.
  12. 1 2 Gray, Tim (December 30, 2015). "'Anomalisa': The Big Challenges of Re-Creating Life on a Small Scale". Variety. Penske Business Media. Retrieved February 29, 2016.
  13. 1 2 Rose, Steve (January 7, 2016). "Masters of puppets: Charlie Kaufman and the subversive allure of stop-motion". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Retrieved July 11, 2018.
  14. ↑ Gross, Terry (December 22, 2015). "Frame-By-Frame, Filmmakers Make The Mundane Miraculous In 'Anomalisa'". Fresh Air. NPR. Retrieved July 11, 2018.
  15. ↑ Kohn, Eric (September 5, 2015). "Telluride Review: Charlie Kaufman's Marvelously Strange 'Anomalisa' is An Animated Identity Crisis". IndieWire. Penske Business Media. Retrieved December 1, 2015.
  16. 1 2 Rooney, David (September 5, 2015). "'Anomalisa': Venice Review". The Hollywood Reporter. Prometheus Global Media. Retrieved December 1, 2015.
  17. ↑ "Anomalisa". Special Presentations. Toronto International Film Festival. Archived from the original on December 8, 2015. Retrieved December 1, 2015.
  18. ↑ Lang, Brent (September 16, 2015). "Toronto: Paramount Buys Charlie Kaufman's 'Anomalisa'". Variety. Penske Business Media. Retrieved September 17, 2015.
  19. ↑ "Anomalisa". Anomalisa Official Website. Paramount Pictures. Archived from the original on December 23, 2015.
  20. ↑ "Anomalisa (2015)". DVDs Release Dates. Retrieved February 17, 2017.
  21. ↑ Ciccone, Brenda (March 7, 2016). "From Academy Award®-Winner* Charlie Kaufman Comes One of the Most Critically Acclaimed Films of the Year, Anomalisa, Debuting on Digital HD March 15, 2016". BusinessWire. Retrieved February 17, 2017.
  22. ↑ "Anomalisa Blu-ray", Blu-Ray.com, retrieved February 17, 2017
  23. ↑ "Anomalisa (2015)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango Media. Retrieved July 11, 2018.
  24. ↑ "Anomalisa Reviews". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved January 22, 2016.
  25. ↑ Calhoun, Dave (September 8, 2015). "Anomalisa". Time Out London. Time Out Group. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  26. ↑ McWeeny, Drew (September 18, 2015). "Review: 'Anomalisa' is the most shattering experiment yet from Charlie Kaufman". HitFix. Uproxx. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  27. ↑ Nicholson, Amy (September 15, 2015). "Charlie Kaufman Has Directed His Second Masterpiece". LA Weekly. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  28. ↑ Bradshaw, Peter (March 10, 2016). "Anomalisa review: a masterpiece about the human condition – with puppets". The Guardian. Guardian News and Media. Retrieved March 20, 2016.
  29. ↑ Kermode, Mark (March 13, 2016). "Anomalisa review – uncanny stop-motion". The Observer. Guardian News and Media. Retrieved March 20, 2016.
  30. ↑ Zacharek, Stephanie (December 21, 2015). "Review: In Anomalisa, Puppets Have Problems Too". Time. Retrieved February 8, 2015.
  31. ↑ Dietz, Jason (December 6, 2015). "Best of 2015: Film Critic Top Ten Lists". Metacritic. CBS Interactive. Retrieved July 11, 2018.
  32. ↑ "2016: Film Nominees". Motion Picture Sound Editors. Archived from the original on January 7, 2017. Retrieved February 10, 2017.
  33. ↑ "The 2015 Nominees". Saturn Awards. Archived from the original on March 11, 2016. Retrieved March 4, 2016.
  34. ↑ "Anomalisa". Paramount Guilds. Paramount Pictures. Archived from the original on March 29, 2017. Retrieved May 27, 2017.
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