This post is a first. It is my first ever post on an animated movie. After 260+ posts, I had actually to add an animation category under my genres. I have repeatedly said that I wouldn’t review animated films or documentaries (heck, sometimes I don’t know what I can even offer when I review a horror film or a comedy). Still, Charlie Kaufman’s (Synecdoche, New York, screenwriter for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) Anomalisa is not your traditional Pixar or Dreamworks animation. And this isn’t really animation. It’s a stop-motion animation, which is entirely different? Well, it is, and it isn’t, I guess. I don’t watch the F/X show Archer or anything on Adult Swim, so I don’t have much of a comparison (if any at all), but Anomalisa was the most adult-oriented animation that I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t adult-oriented in the X-rated sense. I wouldn’t say that there was anything obscene in this movie. It’s just that the themes were very adult-oriented in nature, and you wouldn’t want to be next to a kid while watching this film. Heck, I’m not sure you’d want to be next to anyone during this film. I would not say that I didn’t like this movie. I did expect to like it much more than I did as I kept hearing great things about it. But the two prevailing thoughts that I had while seeing this film were 1) I wanted to like it more than I really did and 2) It was really uncomfortable to watch at times. It is really difficult to recommend this movie.

Michael Stone (David Thewlis – The Theory of Everything, War Horse) is the most unlikeable protagonist cartoon character I’ve ever seen. By the middle of this movie, I loathed him. I’m glad that neither this character existed in real life nor did the actor “play” him. He felt like a guy I would never want to be around. He reminded me of a few people that I’ve met throughout my life. That isn’t a good thing.

Michael is a published author in the area of customer service. While not a celebrity by any means, he is recognized in a few small circles…mainly people whose jobs revolve around customer service. Because of his success as an author, Michael often travels around the country and gives speeches on that particular topic. This movie takes place over about 24 hours. Michael is on an overnight trip to Cincinnati, where he will deliver one of his speeches, this one on his best-selling book, How May I Help You With Them. This book has become somewhat of a Bible for customer service workers across the nation. The first third of the movie shows Michael dealing with the same sorts of things you or I would be dealing with if we were to travel for business. He sits next to a very anxious person on his flight into the city. His cab driver inquires about his life while taking him from the airport to his hotel and informs him about everything he has to do while he’s in the city. We see him check in to his hotel. We see him check in with his wife and son via telephone. We see him do such trivial things as using the bathroom, get frustrated while trying to figure out which button on the phone will allow him to order room service, and take in the view through his bedroom window. It all has a very “we’ve been watching him do the most basic things for 30 minutes now…where is this movie going” sort of feeling. Kaufman is very deliberate with this, though. He is slowly building his lead character and setting us up for what becomes the basis of the movie. Let me explain.

You won’t notice it right away, and when you do see it, you’ll ask yourself why and probably question Kaufman’s decision to do this. But every character we meet (besides Stone and one other character) has the same exact voice. It doesn’t matter if it’s the front desk clerk at the hotel, the waitress in the hotel’s restaurant, his wife, or his son; every single person has the same voice (Tom Noonan – Heat, Snow Angels). It’s very frustrating (especially at first) when you hear a woman with a man’s voice. It’s more than frustrating. It’s stupid. But, unbeknownst to us at the time, this is what Kaufman wants. Michael Stone is a very depressed and self-obsessed man. This guy with average looks, a below-average physique, and a cynical personality where everything in the world seems to annoy him thinks he is something more than he is. Perhaps it is because he is a published author and flown in to give presentations, but he seems to have a sense of entitlement that I found very annoying. Likewise, he was unwilling to engage in even the most straightforward conversation, and when he became frustrated with a situation, he just kind of ended it. He’s looking for something in the world that he hasn’t found. He’s looking for a fulfillment that he either once had and since lost or never had at all.

Michael is a man who is getting older and looking back on his life with bitterness. He’s regretting some of the decisions he has made, mainly because of how unhappy he is. He meets a former girlfriend at the bar of his hotel. Rather than catch up or rehash the good times, he ends up confusing this poor woman to the point where she just ups and leaves. What he thought would help make him feel better actually has Michael feeling worse about himself. I think we’ve all been in situations before where our reality fails to meet our expectations. I don’t believe that he expected the event with his ex-lover to be life-changing, but I think he hoped to get a little clarity or maybe even to catch up on life, share a couple of laughs, and feel better about himself and his situation. Unfortunately, he got none of that and ended up feeling much worse about himself.

He then almost manically goes searching throughout his hotel for something that will help make him feel better. This is when he encounters two young to middle-aged women who have driven four hours to see Michael give his speech the next day. Emily and Lisa are both in the customer service industry and have treated the excursion as a mini vacation. Michael is immediately enamored with Lisa (who is the one that men pursue far less frequently than Emily) from what we are told. Her voice is different from all of the other characters in the movie. Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh) doesn’t have the same mundane voice as every other character in the film, and Michael is attracted to her instantly.

The trio goes back down to the bar for drinks, and all three get completely drunk. On the way back to their rooms, Michael musters the courage to invite Lisa to his room for a nightcap. It’s a delicate situation as Emily is standing right there, but that is what it is. The awkward, self-conscious, and unsophisticated Lisa, influenced by all of the alcohol she’s been drinking, agrees to go with Michael to his room. The two get to know each other on a more personal and intimate level. Lisa is very honest about her life. Like Michael, she’s down on her luck but handles it in a completely different way. You can tell that she is definitely in the customer service industry and that the job doesn’t leave her when she goes home each evening. She masks a lot of her sadness and her pain. But Michael cannot get over how different she is from everyone else he’s ever met, and he seems ready to abandon it all for a chance at happiness with her. Lisa is an anomaly, and that’s where we get the word Anomalisa. He repeats statements to her like, “You’re so different than everyone else,” and Lisa, who thinks of herself as very ordinary, quickly takes to this man who she looked up to before even meeting him. While at first, she believes that she is just a one-night stand, his words convince her otherwise. Soon she’s imagining a future with this guy who says all of these wonderful things about him.

Kaufman has been known for years for creating some of the most unlikable protagonists. Though this is his first stab at animation, he continues that trend here. Michael Stone makes Skeletor from the He-Man cartoon series seem like a guy you’d rather be around. For the most part, Michael is just a guy trying to do what he can to navigate the world. Like most of us, he’s working to earn a paycheck to sustain a lifestyle that he hopes will make him happy. Like most of us, by the time we reach 40, he’s married (or at least have given marriage a shot). Like a lot of us, he has a child. He probably needs to be on medication to improve his mood (this is never discussed), but it’s clear that he is a depressed man. When he meets Lisa, a spark is ignited. Like most of us, when a spark is ignited, we feel motivated and want that feeling to continue. Now, most of us (hopefully) would extinguish that spark if it were to lead us down a path that caused us to do something illegal or immoral. I would hope that most of us would not cheat on our significant other because we are excited about the prospect of another. Now I’m not going to sit here and believe that this is the case.

I’d be fooling myself to think most people would not cheat when they have the opportunity to cheat and not be caught. It would rattle some of us with guilt, but I think many of us would let the temptation of short-term gratification influence us to the point where we could not say no. And then, once we go down that path for the first time and get away with it, what is stopping us from doing it over and over again? What was so disheartening about this character was the ease with which he had an affair. It’s been a while since I saw this movie, so I’m not entirely sure when I say this, but I think we were made to believe that this was the first time he had an affair. I don’t think they ever entirely

If you like Kaufman (and he does have his fan base), you’ll want to see this movie. It’s a movie that was a slightly uncomfortable watch for me and one that I’ll never see again, but I’m glad I saw it. I didn’t think I could find a cartoon character so deplorable. I felt I could relate to Michael in some ways (depression, wanting more out of life, questioning the purpose, etc.), but his narcissism was just too much for me. Michael was all about Michael, no matter who got hurt in the process, and I just was not a fan of that. My other major problem with this film was just how quickly Lisa fell out of favor with Michael. I understand that when her voice slowly starts transitioning to the same voice as all of the other characters in the film, it is symbolic of something much more than just her voice. And I fully understand that the feelings we develop towards someone to who we are attracted (excitement, lust, hope, etc.) can change as we get to know this person; it’s hard for me to believe that all of these new and enthusiastic feelings can change so quickly. Yet for Michael, they do, and we dislike him all the more for it. The way he goes from treating Lisa like a princess to not wanting to have anything to do with her leaves a stale taste in our mouths about who people can treat each other one moment and then treat them entirely differently the next. Lisa is a more distrusting person who is worse off after meeting Michael than she would have been having not met him at all.

Plot 7/10
Character Development 6/10 (I get what the movie was trying to do…I still felt like Stone was underdeveloped from the get-go)
Character Chemistry 7.5/10
Acting 7.5/10 (acting? Well, I hated Thewlis’s character, but appreciated Jason Leigh’s)
Screenplay 7/10
Directing  8/10
Cinematography 10/10 (animated movies automatically get a ten in cinematography? Or a zero?)
Sound 8/10
Hook and Reel 7.5/10
Universal Relevance 10/10 (as much as I disliked this movie, it felt all too real)
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