‘Anomalisa’ will break your heart – Big challenges of recreating life on small scale

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In this very R-rated stop-motion animated feature, scripted by Charlie Kaufman (writer of “Adaptation.” and “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and co-directed by Kaufman and Duke Johnson, we spend one day with this sad sack narcissist on an overnight trip to Cincinnati. He’s there to give a lecture about his book, “How May I Help You Help Them,” a top selling manifesto on the art of customer service. It’s successful enough that people in the hotel recognize him immediately.

But he’s still sad. He has a stilted conversation with his wife and son who stayed behind in Los Angeles. He calls an ex-girlfriend to see if she’ll meet him for a drink. Their breakup was fraught, and so is this encounter.

Back in his room, Michael sinks into himself, bereft of an easy hookup. It’s just him and his Belvedere martinis with a twist until he hears an alarming sound from the hotel hallway — a voice that’s not Tom Noonan’s. It’s Jennifer Jason Leigh’s. Michael bursts out of his room like the owner of this voice is his last chance for survival, frantically knocking on random hotel room doors to find her.

The woman has travelled from Akron, Ohio, (over 200 miles) to hear him speak. She’s a big fan, as is her co-worker. And this woman is different in voice and face. Her name is Lisa. She’s an anomaly. She’s his Anoma-Lisa, he tells her later when things get intimate.

Stunning

Leigh’s nuanced vocals bring what could have been a slip of a character to life. It’s a stunning, emotionally truthful performance that makes you wish more awards would recognize voice acting.

Lisa has the confidence of a middle school girl (read: none). Her levels might even be in the negative numbers. She is sweet and excitable and good-natured, but cripplingly self-conscious. She second-guesses everything she says. She ends sentences with “shut up Lisa!” She thinks she’s ugly, dumb and unsophisticated.

Actually, Lisa is basically a girl in an adult woman’s body. She is gawky and awkward. She stumbles over her own feet and really likes to press the buttons in the elevator. But she still goes back to Michael’s room when he asks her to after a few drinks, knowing full well what that means.

The story doesn’t willfully hide details from the viewer, but it does evolve in surprising ways. Even after two viewings, I can’t settle on a single thesis. That’s probably what makes it valuable.

You can feel for Michael and empathize with his existential solitude, or you can roll your eyes at him. I did. He’s fairly insufferable, and it takes a while to realize that perhaps the problem isn’t everyone else — it’s him. He’s unable to see outside himself and condescends to others with abandon while profiting off of a customer service ideology that he clearly doesn’t believe — that everyone deserves to be loved, that everyone is an individual, that a smile costs nothing and can make a person’s day.

There is little entertainment in watching a narcissist’s worldview realized. It’s more like heartbreaking dread. The fact that Kaufman (his follow up to “Synecdoche, New York”) and Johnson (his first feature) accomplished all of this with puppets is all the more astounding.

“Anomalisa” is an anomaly. It’s distinctive, bold, and achingly human. Sometimes art needs to splash us with cold water to give us an experience that is not just passive enjoyment, but active introspection. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.

The sets, costumes and props in “Anomalisa” are recognizable as everyday things — but since the film is stop-motion, every item had to be created from scratch. The film centers on motivational speaker Michael, who finds romance with another hotel guest, Lisa. There were 18 Michaels and six Lisas created. And the simplest gesture required hard work: For example, there were a dozen nearly-identical martini glasses in which the amount of “liquid” changes when Michael takes a drink. The two directors, Charlie Kaufman (at left in the photo) and Duke Johnson, talked with Variety about the intricacies of re-creating everyday life at one-sixth its size and their colleagues’ contributions.

Johnson: Every single thing you see on screen was fabricated. There’s a challenge in that, but also a freedom, because you get to create an entire world. Even the pictures hanging on the walls in Michael’s house, they’re all original paintings and shrunken down. The photo on the wall over the hotel-room minibar is a snapshot I took when I was studying abroad in Prague.

Kaufman: We think that works to the benefit of the film in a lot of ways. Michael spends a lot of time alone in his room doing mundane things. But you’re interested because you know that there were decisions made every time he moves. As an audience, you get fascinated with the choices made, and the craftsmanship that goes into it. I’ve always loved everything to do with sets and artifice, even life-sized. But there is something about small sets that really appeals to me. And the people who do it are amazing. I am blown away when I see these sets.

Johnson: I hate to say it, but the design team got fascinated with the sex shop. They had to make a bunch of tiny leather masks, little magazines, DVD’s, lingerie, lubes. There are fertility statues and they had to sculpt these things out of either foam or Sculpey and then bake them. Even the little dildos are handmade pieces of art.

Position

Kaufman: The costumes have to be animate-able. They’re not just little costumes, which is hard enough. But they’ve all got wires that allow them to be posed in different position, so it looks like the fabric is fluttering when the characters move, for example. You also have to find fabrics that look like Lisa’s sweater material; it’s not real sweater material, but looks like it for someone who’s that size. She has little flower designs, and they’re all hand-stitched. There are many Lisas, and all had to be hand-stitched.

Johnson: And buttons. They don’t make buttons that small. They sculpt and bake and shape and paint them. The belt buckles all had to work. That concept applies to everything. Everything has to function as well as look good. All the sets are modular because you have to access the puppets. A lot of the sets have hinged doors; the dresser and lamp will be attached to the wall, so when you move the wall for certain shots and then return it, the furniture remains exactly in place.

Johnson: We told Joe to approach it like a live-action film. Typically (with stop motion) you put the lights up or you bounce them and it gets more of a broad lighting. To light it like live action, you ask: “Where is the key light, the back light? How do you get the lights reflected in the characters’ eyes?” You want to put a 2K here, but what’s a 2K translate to, in one-sixth scale? So a lot of times they were making lights. They shrunk everything down. Also, the lamps onscreen are made to be hollow, so a wire goes through desk, then you drill a hole in the set, wired underneath and plugged in. They even put diffusion over those bulbs.

Kaufman: I think it was crazy-making for the cinematographer and the animators. It’s usually lit so that the animators have complete access to the set. This is lit like a regular movie, which is not what they usually do; we had lighting grids. But everybody recognized that it looks gorgeous.

Kaufman: We recorded the three actors together and that set the tone for the production. Often in animation, the actors work separately, but we did it as if it were a play, in linear fashion, with the actors overlapping each other and interacting. We also have the odd conceit of Tom Noonan doing so many characters; that was a twist and makes it a bigger job, but it’s a cleaner job you can pick and choose. We had our Tom voices, which we had to layer and multiply for the background in the airport and the bar, for example. We recorded a lot of Tom Noonan having conversations. (Agencies)

Johnson: I think it’s basically the same as live-action, because some of the ambient sound, you want it to articulate the characters’ experience, as you would in live action.

Kaufman: We also had stylized, foreboding sounds, but they’re based in practical ideas — like a very foreboding air-conditioning system. So it’s not realistic. There’s no practical sound in an animated movie; everything is created. When you’re finished with production, everything is created in that session and that was fun, you starting to see it come to life and making all those sound choices. It was exciting.

Johnson: There are many specialized craftsmen/fabricators who work in this medium consistently. They study fine-art, then get into animation, then fall in love with stop-motion and start making little things. Typically, an animated film will take five years, but that’s partly because they do two years of research and development. We didn’t have that luxury because of budget, so we kind of hit the ground running. We did six weeks of R&D, which is unheard-of. We found a million things a day that we needed to do better. So the whole movie, from the beginning to the very end, we were improving things.

Kaufman: If this were a live-action movie, we could have shot it in a week. As opposed to two years. I think this is the best form of collaboration. All movies are collaborative, but here, there are so many people creating a performance — the actors, of course, but also the designers, animators, people who put hair in. And it results in a person that moves because of all this, and there is something very exciting about seeing all these artisans come together. (Agencies)

By Lindsey Bahr

This news has been read 4389 times!