Anomalisa

Anomalisa is a 2015 American stop-motion drama film directed and produced by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, and written by Kaufman based on his 2005 play of the same name. It was released on December 30, 2015 by Paramount Pictures. The film follows a lonely self-help author (voiced by David Thewlis) who perceives everyone as identical (Tom Noonan) until he meets a unique woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in a Cincinnati hotel.

Anomalisa has an approval rating of 91% at Rotten Tomatoes and 87/100 at Metacritic. It is the first R-rated animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, a Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film, and five Annie Awards. It became the first animated film to win the Grand Jury Prize at the 72nd Venice International Film Festival, after premiering at the Telluride Film Festival on September 4, 2015.

Plot

In 2005, self-help author Michael Stone (David Thewlis) travels to Cincinnati, Ohio to promote his latest book at a customer service convention. He is distant to everyone around him, whom he perceives as identical white men with identical faces and voices (Tom Noonan), including his wife and son.

Charlie Kaufman

Charles Stuart "Charlie" Kaufman (born November 19, 1958) is an American screenwriter, producer, director, and lyricist. He wrote the films Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). He made his directorial debut with Synecdoche, New York (2008), which was also well-received; film critic Roger Ebert named it "the best movie of the decade" in 2009. It was followed by Anomalisa (2015).

Throughout his career, Kaufman has been lauded by critics for his creativity and originality: Being John Malkovich features John Malkovich as a fictional version of himself finding that his own mind is accessible by others; Human Nature touches on themes of behaviorism and is told mostly in flashbacks; Adaptation follows Nicolas Cage as Kaufman himself, trying to write the film itself and to understand the book from which it is adapted, with the help of his twin brother Donald Kaufman (credited as a co-writer despite being a fictional character); Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind takes place mainly in the mind of the main character as his memory is erased; Synecdoche, New York is a postmodern film with many complex and surrealist elements; and Anomalisa follows the life of a self-help guru who experiences everyone, save the titular Lisa, as having the same voice and face.

David Thewlis

David Thewlis (né Wheeler; born 20 March 1963) is an English actor. His most commercially successful role to date has been that of Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter film series. Other notable performances include the films Naked (for which he won the Best Actor award at Cannes Film Festival), Dragonheart, Kingdom of Heaven, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, The Theory of Everything, Black Beauty and Macbeth, in which he played King Duncan. He has also done voice work in the films James and the Giant Peach (1996), The Miracle Maker (2000) and Anomalisa (2015).

Early life

Thewlis, the second of three children, was born in Blackpool, Lancashire, the son of Maureen (née Thewlis) and Alec Raymond Wheeler. Both parents worked at his father's shop. As a teenager, he played in a rock band called QED, and played lead guitar with a punk rock band called Door 66. He was educated at Highfield High School, a state secondary school in South Shore, Blackpool. Later, he enrolled in the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, graduating in 1984.

Carter Burwell

Carter Benedict Burwell (born November 18, 1955) is an American composer of film scores. He is best known as a regular collaborator of the Coen brothers, having scored 17 of their films, among them Raising Arizona (1987), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), No Country for Old Men (2007), Burn After Reading (2008), and True Grit (2010). Other notable works include the Spike Jonze films Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002) and Where the Wild Things Are (2009), David O. Russell's Three Kings (1999), the miniseries Olive Kitteridge (2014), Anomalisa (2015), and Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine (1998), Mildred Pierce miniseries, and Carol (2015).

Early life and education

Burwell was born in New York City, the son of Natalie (née Benedict), a math teacher, and Charles Burwell, who founded Thaibok Fabrics, Ltd. He graduated from King School in Stamford, Connecticut, and Harvard College, where he was a cartoonist for The Harvard Lampoon.

Career

As a film composer, Burwell has had a long-working relationship with the Coen brothers, providing music for every film they have made (except for O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Inside Llewyn Davis, which had folk music soundtracks produced by T-Bone Burnett). He enjoys working with left-field directors, such as Spike Jonze. Among his best known film scores are Miller's Crossing (1990), And the Band Played On (1993), Conspiracy Theory (1997), Hamlet (2000), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007), In Bruges (2008), Twilight (2008), Where The Wild Things Are (2009), The Blind Side (2009), and Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011). Burwell wrote and recorded the original score for the film The Bourne Identity, but his version was replaced by director Doug Liman for one by John Powell.

Stop motion

Stop motion is an animation technique that physically manipulates an object that appears to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence. Dolls with movable joints or clay figures are often used in stop motion for their ease of repositioning. Stop motion animation using plasticine is called clay animation or "clay-mation". Not all stop motion requires figures or models; many stop motion films can involve using humans, household appliances and other things for comedic effect. Stop motion using objects is sometimes referred to as object animation.

Terminology

The term "stop motion", related to the animation technique, is often spelled with a hyphen, "stop-motion". Both orthographical variants, with and without the hyphen, are correct, but the hyphenated one has, in addition, a second meaning, not related to animation or cinema: "a device for automatically stopping a machine or engine when something has gone wrong" (The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 1993 edition).