This post is a first. It is my first-ever post on an animated movie. After 260+ posts, I had to add an animation category under my genres. I have repeatedly said that I wouldn’t review animated films or documentaries. 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 an entirely different stop-motion animation. Well, it is, and it isn’t. 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); Anomalisa was the most adult-oriented animation I’ve ever seen. It wasn’t adult-oriented in the X-rated sense. There wasn’t anything obscene in this movie. It’s just that the themes were very adult-oriented, and you wouldn’t want to be next to a kid while watching this film. I don’t think 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 did, and 2) It was uncomfortable to watch at times. It is tough 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, 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 nationwide.

The first third of the movie shows Michael dealing with the same things you or I would be dealing with if we were to travel for business. He sits beside 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 into 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, getting frustrated while trying to figure out which button on the phone will allow him to order room service, and taking 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” 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 another character) has the same voice. It doesn’t matter if it’s the hotel’s front desk clerk, the hotel’s restaurant waitress, his wife, or his son; everyone 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 seems to annoy him thinks he is something more than he is. Perhaps it is because he is a published author and has 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 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 made Michael feel worse about himself. We’ve all been in situations 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 he hoped to get some clarity or maybe even catch up on life, share a couple of laughs, and feel better about himself and his situation. Unfortunately, he got none of that and felt much worse about himself.

He then almost manically searches throughout his hotel for something to help 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 returns 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 stands 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 more personally and intimately. Lisa is very honest about her life. Like Michael, she’s down on her luck but handles it differently. 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 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 repeated statements to her like, “You’re so different than everyone else,” Lisa, who thinks of herself as very ordinary, quickly took to this man she had looked up to before meeting him. While she initially believes she is just a one-night stand, his words convince her otherwise. Soon, she’s imagining a future with this guy who says all these wonderful things about him.

Kaufman has been known 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 many of us, he’s married by the time we reach 40 (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 ignites. Like most of us, when a spark ignites, 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.

I’d be fooling myself to think most people would not cheat when they have the opportunity to cheat and not get caught. It would rattle many 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, what stops us from doing it repeatedly once we go down that path for the first time and get away with it? What was 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 has a 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 was not a fan of that. My other major problem with this film was 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 symbolizes much more than just her voice. I fully understand that the feelings we develop towards someone we are attracted to (excitement, lust, hope, etc.) can change as we get to know this person; it’s hard for me to believe 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 anything to do with her leaves a stale taste in our mouths about how people can treat each other one moment and then treat them entirely differently the next. Lisa is a more distrustful person who is worse off after meeting Michael than if she had not met him.

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)
78.5%

C

Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie

• BoJack Horseman
• Dogtooth
• Adaptation
• Honey Boy
• Synecdoche, New York