Jenny applauds Kaufman and Johnson for their 5-star animation Anomalisa
The scene: c1984, Little Angel Children’s Puppet Theatre in Islington, North London, mid performance of something bland such as Meg and Mog
Small son (screaming): I’m not staying here!
Embarrassed mother (me): Shhh!
Small son: I hate those puppets, they’re evil!
Embarrassed mother: Why?
Small son: They come alive and they’ll come and get me!
Yes, well-spotted that son, puppets have a weird, dream-like quality of their own, half way as they are between doll and human and they do so in this strange and brilliant film.
The well-named Michael Stone is in Cincinatti, chosen for its mid-west anonymity. He is an author and motivational speaker whose subject is customer care. I have done my occasional stints as a motivational speaker and I have many times stayed in anonymous hotels just like this one. The whole grisly business of checking in and being taken to your room is shown in real time and made me ache with laughter: the receptionist who has certainly absorbed every word of Michael’s book and is able to recite his welcome incantation with utterly fake empathy and without pausing for breath; the bellhop who explains that this is the bathroom and this is the window with his hand held out for the tip; the dark room (always too dark to read your documents easily except in the overlit bathroom); the shower that is too hot then too cold; the grim view; the long long corridor with identical doors; the key card that only works on the third attempt; the room service where bland food is made to sound enticing by describing the raspberry vinaigrette on the lettuce. Yes, I’ve been there.
It seems that everyone apart from Michael has an identical face in this world and their voices, man woman or child, are spoken by the same actor, Tom Noonan. That is until he meets a breathless fan who is coming to his session the following day. Lisa is a naïve, sweetly spoken young woman disfigured by a facial scar. Jennifer Jason Leigh voices this part with astonishing depth. Lisa and Michael have a one night affair.
Why puppets for this extraordinary riff on the loneliness and pointlessness of human existence? Why as a director put yourself through three whole years where the stop-action animators were doing well to produce a mere 2 seconds a day and at a total cost of $10m? Because clearly nothing else would do. The puppets have a foreshortened, stumpy appearance, their skin vulnerably fuzzy, their eyes full of pain. They make it plain that our belief in free will is an illusion: we are puppets.
The heart of the film is the sex scene. Could human actors reproduce the painful awkwardness of sex with a new lover when for instance, you accidentally bang your head on the headboard, say ‘sorry’ too much or get overcome by shyness? Or convey the experience of intoxicating and illusory connection when biology does its bit? Probably not. I have never seen a movie scene like this: funny, so tastefully done, touching and oddly erotic where I had to keep reminding myself, ‘these are puppets!’
Disaffected middle-aged fatalists are nothing new in American cinema and fiction but Michael is a special case, a man out of time and place. David Thewlis, who voices Michael, has a slow, downbeat Mancunian accent but his character is living in LA. His marriage is failing. He doesn’t believe his own advice any more. He is making a living by trudging through his life, peddling the lie that customer service brings happiness. The literal nightmare of the film is his dream where, running up that dark corridor, his puppet mask falls off, revealing a terrifying cardboard skull beneath.
This is an animated film with no talking animals or jolly ending. Yes, that small son was absolutely right, puppets do have a quality of strange otherness that in this case will haunt you long after you have emerged, blinking, into ‘reality’.
The scene: c1984, Little Angel Children’s Puppet Theatre in Islington, North London, mid performance of something bland such as Meg and Mog
Small son (screaming): I’m not staying here!
Embarrassed mother (me): Shhh!
Small son: I hate those puppets, they’re evil!
Embarrassed mother: Why?
Small son: They come alive and they’ll come and get me!
Yes, well-spotted that son, puppets have a weird, dream-like quality of their own, half way as they are between doll and human and they do so in this strange and brilliant film.
The well-named Michael Stone is in Cincinatti, chosen for its mid-west anonymity. He is an author and motivational speaker whose subject is customer care. I have done my occasional stints as a motivational speaker and I have many times stayed in anonymous hotels just like this one. The whole grisly business of checking in and being taken to your room is shown in real time and made me ache with laughter: the receptionist who has certainly absorbed every word of Michael’s book and is able to recite his welcome incantation with utterly fake empathy and without pausing for breath; the bellhop who explains that this is the bathroom and this is the window with his hand held out for the tip; the dark room (always too dark to read your documents easily except in the overlit bathroom); the shower that is too hot then too cold; the grim view; the long long corridor with identical doors; the key card that only works on the third attempt; the room service where bland food is made to sound enticing by describing the raspberry vinaigrette on the lettuce. Yes, I’ve been there.
It seems that everyone apart from Michael has an identical face in this world and their voices, man woman or child, are spoken by the same actor, Tom Noonan. That is until he meets a breathless fan who is coming to his session the following day. Lisa is a naïve, sweetly spoken young woman disfigured by a facial scar. Jennifer Jason Leigh voices this part with astonishing depth. Lisa and Michael have a one night affair.
Why puppets for this extraordinary riff on the loneliness and pointlessness of human existence? Why as a director put yourself through three whole years where the stop-action animators were doing well to produce a mere 2 seconds a day and at a total cost of $10m? Because clearly nothing else would do. The puppets have a foreshortened, stumpy appearance, their skin vulnerably fuzzy, their eyes full of pain. They make it plain that our belief in free will is an illusion: we are puppets.
The heart of the film is the sex scene. Could human actors reproduce the painful awkwardness of sex with a new lover when for instance, you accidentally bang your head on the headboard, say ‘sorry’ too much or get overcome by shyness? Or convey the experience of intoxicating and illusory connection when biology does its bit? Probably not. I have never seen a movie scene like this: funny, so tastefully done, touching and oddly erotic where I had to keep reminding myself, ‘these are puppets!’
Disaffected middle-aged fatalists are nothing new in American cinema and fiction but Michael is a special case, a man out of time and place. David Thewlis, who voices Michael, has a slow, downbeat Mancunian accent but his character is living in LA. His marriage is failing. He doesn’t believe his own advice any more. He is making a living by trudging through his life, peddling the lie that customer service brings happiness. The literal nightmare of the film is his dream where, running up that dark corridor, his puppet mask falls off, revealing a terrifying cardboard skull beneath.
This is an animated film with no talking animals or jolly ending. Yes, that small son was absolutely right, puppets do have a quality of strange otherness that in this case will haunt you long after you have emerged, blinking, into ‘reality’.
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