Anomalisa and new depths to animations

Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa last year raised the bar for stop motion animations. It brought a new sense to how puppets can be used to make the most human film of the year. The movie involves a character, Michael Stone, who is British, moderately famous, middle-aged and knows a few tricks about business strategies. He travels a lot, like George Clooney in Up in the Air, with dark circles under his eyes and headphones in his ears.

Anomalisa became the latest masterpiece of Kaufman after seven years of wait. In 2012, the crowdfunded campaign he started brought twice as much and helped increase the length of the short film to a full fledge award winner. It is not just another animation, but a film envisioned around the existential dread, a sad man who hates to tell strategies that help people listen to lies and stay happy on a telephone. While Michael rehearses his speech, he hates every word written in it. Actually, Kaufman recalls Anomalisa as supposed to be an audio only staged radio appearance with three actors, the same who we saw in the movie. Kaufman wanted the audience to imagine the film themselves. However, after he received funding, he managed to make a movie that was not aimed at the children but a film that would portray the voices of those who recorded it.

Anomalisa is a front-loaded movie in terms of conceptualization. As it a low budget film, they used a process called animatic. It includes recording the voices first and then using it to draw the movie board, after which the shots take place. As the film progresses, the animation takes over, and drawings fade. It is not something you can post-produce; it requires real-time ideas and instant application. The whole movie happens to be realistic, based on a real person so that it can engage the audience. As per Kaufman, there is a quality of imperfections that audience can find which makes it heartbreaking, beautiful and touching.