Review of Anomalisa (2015) by Andrew M — 10 Jan 2016

If your cinematic bucket list includes seeing an animated feature with stop motion characters fornicating in a hotel room in Cincinatti, OH, then this is for you. Bizarre, trippy, surreal, absurdist are just give a few adjectives to describe this self indulgent work of a quirky film maker.

It's a very simple story about a sales motivational speaker from Los Angeles going out of town leaving his wife and son back home. After checking into his hotel he orders room service and then calls an old flame to meet in the hotel bar for drinks.

His bibb lettuce with walnut balsamic dressing and salmon with baby asparagas is never delivered. Instead Michael Stone ruminates on opporutunities lost, loves lost and the general ennui of living an unfulfilled life.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is the voice of Lisa (hence the film title hint hint) and David Thewlis is Michael's voice. Curiously all other voices in the film whether male or female are all done by Tom Noonan, so it's a bit off putting to see/hear a woman in a skirt speaking in a low baritone.

Of course Michael needs to freshen up for his meeting with his old flame in the hotel bar, so director Kaufman decides to show us what a stop motion grown man acts like in a too hot shower followed by prancing around his hotel room with a liberated penis-TMI for sure.

As for the sex scene (Really? A stop motion sex scene that doesn't just simulate sex, but gets our animated lovers out of their clothes and onto each others' animated birthday suits, including an animated man being animated in anticipation of going down on his animated woman?), it just doesn't work in animation, anime maybe, but animation no.

Overlayered throughout the film is insecurity and inevitable dissapointment and dissolutionment of a life poorly lived. Once at the lecturn for his motivational talk to sales reps from around the country, Michael melts down with some now unfortunately obligatory Hollywood anti-Repubican rants that are completely off topic for his audience of sales "professionals".

Most curious of all is the need to have each characters' face consist of parts or segments seperated by animated fault lines, primarily through the temple/TMJ across the bridge of the nose giving an almost Clutch Cargo (Google his name if you don't know it) effect.

In sum, I left the screening asking myself, what did I see? I cannot answer actually because I still don't know what I saw. Yes, I saw stop action animanted people in coitus and I never thought that the process that gave us Dumbo and Tinker Bell would lead to animation attempting to simulate adult genitals, Walt Disney must be spinning in his animator's inkwell.

When asked if he wanted to do something he had no interest in doing whatsoever, Louis B. Mayer (Co-founder of MGM Studios) famously replied: "Include me out!" Yep, include me out of this bizarre attempt at ground breaking animation.

In many respects it is just creepy to imagine the visual equivalent of puppets getting it on. Pass....