And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment. Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
Hope
To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.--
Erich Fromm
A masterpiece about the human condition – with puppets
Charlie Kaufman achieves further artistic greatness with this hilariously funny and horribly real animation about the unbearable loneliness of being.
The hell of other people fuses with the hell of loneliness in this strange miniature masterpiece from Charlie Kaufman. It’s an eerily detailed puppet animation about a motivational speaker who spends one unhappy night in a Cincinnati hotel. It is really funny, and incidentally boasts one of the most extraordinarily real sex scenes in film history. It also scared me the way a top-notch horror or a sci-fi dystopia might. Being amused or scared at Anomalisa feels like choosing between the blue pill or the red pill in The Matrix.
Is it about a man having a midlife breakdown? Or is this the breakdown itself? Is this film just one long hallucinatory symptom of cognitive disorder? David Thewlis voices Michael Stone, an expatriate Brit in the US who has made a name and career for himself writing motivational books about customer service. He’s in Cincinnati to give a speech on this subject – a little like George Clooney’s sleek character in the Jason Reitman comedy Up in the Air. But so far from being a dynamic or charismatic individual, Michael is clinically depressed: small, cowed. He is numbed and alienated from the world.
This is partly because Cincinnati has bad and guilty memories for him. It was here that, 10 years before, Michael broke up with his long-term girlfriend Bella in a spasm of commitment-phobic panic he still can’t explain to himself, and he wonders if he ought to call her up for a drink while he’s in town to apologise. His self-doubt and self-hate extend to his current relationship (he is married with a son) and to relationships in general. Yet while he’s in the hotel, Michael has an intense encounter with a besotted fan: a call-centre worker called Lisa. They have a conversation about the word “anomaly” and how it applies in an illusory way to all of us. Everyone thinks they are anomalous; different from everyone else and special. Michael nicknames Lisa “Anomalisa”. Is this a cruel if unintentional joke at her expense?
Jennifer Jason Leigh voices Lisa, but every other character apart from Michael – from the blandly complaisant hotel receptionist to Michael’s variously testy and furious wife and ex-girlfriend – is voiced by Tom Noonan. This is partly what gives the film its dreamlike buzz. It lets you feel Michael’s vertigo of existential fear.
Anomalisa doesn’t have to exert itself to be strange, although everything about it is unforgettably, skin-crawlingly strange, especially the banal boringness of dull things, painstakingly created in this puppety universe. The simple experience of checking into a hotel and then going up in the lift and walking into your room is shown in real time: Kaufman and his co-director and animator Duke Johnson make it as riveting as any thriller. And the film brilliantly responds to the phenomenon of the hotel room itself: flavourless, corporate, dull, like the room service menu – but, like that menu, liberating and delicious in its lack of identity. One of the most fascinatingly bizarre moments comes when Michael is looking out of his window and sees a man in the building opposite masturbating to images on his computer. The man looks sharply up and it is Michael who looks guiltily away.
Like Kaufman’s screenplays for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich, Anomalisa is about the mysterious prison of identity and consciousness, the need to be freed from this prison by love, and the sickening pain of unrequited passion or post-coital letdown that reveals this hope to have been an illusion. Eight years ago, Kaufman directed another extraordinary film, Synecdoche, New York, about a yearning for artistic greatness. Kaufman achieved it then – and he achieves it again now. Is there anyone else in the movies doing such unique and extraordinary work?
The film was funded via Kickstarter after traditional studios found the adult, psychological subject matter too risky for animation.
The Puppets: The directors chose not to hide the seams on the puppets’ faces (where the 3D-printed parts join). This emphasizes the artificiality of the characters and serves as a metaphor for the masks people wear.
The Sex Scene: The film features a famous, uncomfortably realistic sex scene between the puppets. It was praised for its vulnerability and for being one of the most "human" depictions of intimacy in cinema, despite the characters being made of resin and silicone.
The film is famously cynical about romantic "soulmates." Michael is enraptured by Lisa because she is different, but as soon as they spend a night together, he begins to notice her small "flaws"—the way she eats, the way she talks. Slowly, her voice begins to shift back into the monotone of Tom Noonan. It suggests that Michael’s loneliness is self-imposed; he is an "anomaly hunter" who loses interest as soon as the novelty of a new person fades.
The name "Anomalisa" represents Michael's tendency to objectify the people he loves. By turning Lisa into an "anomaly," he places her on a pedestal that she can never realistically stay on. The moment she displays human traits—clumsiness, excitement, or specific eating habits—she ceases to be a perfect anomaly and begins to merge back into the "Everyone Else" that Michael detests.
The "Universal" Voice and the Fregoli Delusion
The use of Tom Noonan to voice every character except the two leads is the film's most striking artistic choice. It effectively places the audience inside Michael’s head, making the viewer feel the same crushing mundanity and exhaustion that he feels. The hotel itself is named "The Fregoli," explicitly referencing the psychological condition where the sufferer perceives everyone as one person. It highlights the tragedy of a man who literally cannot see the individuality in others because he has lost his own sense of self-worth.
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