Okay, have to leave to edit Harmontown. Might be able to check in for upvoted questions later. THANK YOU FOR SO MANY INTERESTING QUESTIONS, you guys are ...well, you're everything you seem to think I am. Bless your insane hearts.

AND PLEDGE TO THE ANOMALISA Kickstarter ()

WARNING! There are spoilers in the plot or character descriptions. You've been warned.

Poll

If you've seen the film, please rate it at this poll:

If you haven't seen the film but would like to see the result of the poll go here:

Summary: Michael Stone, an author of books on the subject of customer service, struggles to connect with people. One night, while on a routine business trip, he meets Lisa, a stranger with a unique voice.

Directors: Charlie Kaufman, Duke Johnson

Writer: Charlie Kaufman

Cast:

• David Thewlis as Michael Stone

• Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lisa

• Tom Noonan as Everyone else

Rotten Tomatoes:

Metacritic:

After Credits Scene?: No

If you haven't seen it, go watch it, especially if you like Charlie Kaufman's other work. It's a stop-motion animated film about a man who has come to perceive everyone's faces and voices as identical, causing nobody to stand out. That is until he encounters a woman who has her own unique face and voice.

I saw this film a few years ago but it just occurred to me that it's a great portrayal of how I and perhaps many schizoids experience the world. Obviously I can tell others apart, and I am aware that surficial behavior often does not reflect most people's depth and individuality. Even so, almost everyone just blends into the background. I have almost zero curiosity about the people I encounter, whether it be family, colleagues, or strangers. On the rare occasion in which I do find someone interesting (for reasons I do not understand), it is easy to become hyperfixated on them. The weight of that person's judgement of me becomes the weight of humanity's judgement. Yet just like in the film, if I discover major flaws; if I experience disgust, then that person will eventually fade into the background as well (is this Syzygy's "lampification?").

What do you think of the film? Have you had an "Anomalisa" in your life?

Dino Stamatopoulos flamed comedy writer for Conan O'Brien, The Ben Stiller Show, Mr. Show, and The Dana Carvey Show where he met Charlie Kaufman. Creator of Moral Orel and Mary Shelley's Frankenhole for Adult Swim, and Community's Starburns is now working on Charlie Kaufman's, Anomalisa.

ok I'm back!

Every time I go into a Kaufman film I have high expectations, and every time he manages to smash them. Anomalisa was no exception.

There is lots to love about this movie. As always, it's magnificently written. Incredibly smart but full of heart. The dialogue feels incredibly natural, and is captivating throughout.

Visually it's bizarre, obviously using 3D printed puppets in stop motion. At times it's eerily realistic, and the attention to detail is phenomenal. The facial expressions alone are a thing to marvel, communicating so much in micro-changes that would normally go ignored in this medium.

The set design is unbelievable. The smallest of details have all been considered. In a video on they show how inside Lisa's handbag is a compact mirror which opens up as an individual item, but we never actually see inside her bag. Kaufman has gone to the same extremes of set design and mise en scene that Wes Anderson is often praised for, creating the scenes as fully realised environments, not just a frame for the camera to look at.

The voice acting... bizarre. I thought I was going mad at first, having heard nothing about it when I went into the film. Tom Noonan is brilliant in the restraint he shows, delivering into the concept by refusing to intonate his voice to suit the characters. Both David Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh are fantastic, and the nuances in their cadence and intonation convey an incredible amount, and really help you buy into their relationship. Even through their voice acting the two leads ooze chemistry.

The concept is quite simple, but delivered in a complex and layered way. I will inevitably need repeat viewings and time to process it to give a full analysis of the themes, but my initial takeouts are focused around malaise, fleeting passion, and the feeling of loneliness you can have when surrounded by others. Michael has reached a point in life where he has lost the zest for life, and everyone around him has just become part of the wallpaper. He then meets Lisa, who is different to everyone else. She's an anomaly. And in meeting her he rediscovers that zest. He remembers what he's lost, and it revitalises his life, making him feel alive again. He begins to find his own purpose as a result of what he sees in her. However, it is a fleeting feeling, and as he discovers more about her he feels less and less invigorated by her. He starts noticing the flaws that make her human, make her like everyone else. And as he notices more and more of these, she becomes more and more human, and he hears her just like everyone else. She is no longer this glorious anomaly that can give him purpose, she's just human like everyone else.

I think the viewer is meant to realise that we can't define ourselves through other people, and if we want to find some kind of purpose or reason for our existence, it's not going to come from an external influence. To do that you need to put someone on an unrealistic pedastle that they'll never live up to, and never be able to fulfill you. You could extrapolate from that that Kaufman thinks fulfillment needs to come from an internal source, something inside you rather than another person, although I don't think Kaufman goes as far as to preach solutions to the audience. I think he is more exploring the feeling and headspace that people end up in, instead of trying to fix a problem.

Overall I loved this film, and I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on it.

Thought starters -

1. What was your take on the themes? Did you read it differently to me?

2. Why did Kaufman choose to use stop-motion to convey these themes? What did the medium say about the subject matter? Was this perhaps to place increased focus on the audio, and the voice acting in particular?

3. How does this align with the other entries in Kaufman's filmography, and what can we learn from his world view?

4. How do you think Anomalisa will stack up come awards season? Has it got a chance of taking any major awards?

5. What did you think of the dream sequence? Too heavy handed and direct, or a necessary explanation of the themes? Why did Michael's face fall off in it?

6. What was the purpose of the Cindy Lauper song?

7. What was the purpose of the Japanese (?) robot he gets in the sex store? What was the song it sang near the end?

8. The lights going out as they ran down the corridor was an obvious callback to Eternal Sunshine. Were there any others to his other films?

9. Anomalisa means 'Goddess of Heaven' according to Lisa's Japanese to English dictionary? If I heard it right, it sounds like she says 'Anomarisa'. What is the meaning of this bit of dialogue?

10. What did Kaufman get wrong? How could this film have been improved?

Discovered this on Paramount+ this weekend and had no idea how good it was. Can't recommend it enough

I didn't post a link to a trailer or anything because this movie is really much better if you know nothing about it going in. Just know that it's from the mind of Charlie Kaufman. If you like what he has created before, you will more than likely enjoy this as well. I was blown away finding it on amazon prime yesterday not knowing what it was, so I just thought I would share.

( the trailer if you're unfamiliar)

Damn.

It's a strikingly simple story and yet devastatingly effective. I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall when Charlie Kaufman pitched the story ideas for Being John Malkovich, or Adaptation, or Eternal Sunshine, or Synecdoche, but this would've been an extremely simple pitch. That's all I'll say.

Contrasting Kaufman's last film, Synecdoche New York, which takes place over the course of an entire lifetime, Anomalisa takes place over the course of a day. But like Caden in Synecdoche, Michael in Anomalisa is a broken man looking for something he's lost (or perhaps something he's never had but always wanted): a human connection. Meaning. Answers. To feel...better.

There's a choice they made about the voice acting that's a little off-putting at first. But there's a reason for it. There's a choice they made about the design of the characters' faces that's a little off-putting at first. But there's a reason for it.

Eventually, I forgot I was watching puppets (or, not puppets, whatever you call them).

If I were to find one common thread among all of Kaufman's movies so far, from Being John Malkovich to Anomalisa, it would be loneliness. And while loneliness may have been the subtext of Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine, and Synecdoche, it's full on text in Anomalisa, and it's explored deeper and more creatively than I can remember seeing in a movie.

Now I just really need a hug.

This movie ruined me. I don't normally cry watching movies. Not even when the dog dies. But oh my god.

This movie fucked my shit up good.

I've struggled with depression and anxiety for years, many of us have. And this movie just nailed how it is. I was able to hold it together until the scene where his face was trying to come off in front of the mirror. It reminded me of a time a few years ago, staring into the mirror after work, and having a breakdown. It sneaks up on you. And you panic and try to stave it off, but it keeps coming.

It's a living nightmare. And you feel starved for love, even when it's all around you. You feel lonely. You think you find the one thing you need to be happy, and hold on to it because your life depends on it. Then it drifts into the same droning greyness everything else has turned into. And in the end, the reason you lack love is that you lack love for yourself, and have none to give, and therefore can't properly receive. And it's a cyclical, recurring nightmare with no foreseeable end.

And Anomalisa captured this in a way that was magic. It had me sobbing like a bitch for most of the second half of the movie. Just for how much I connected with the main character's feelings. It moved me.

Sufferers of Depression and Anxiety, if you have not seen this movie, watch this movie. If you do not suffer from Depression and Anxiety, watch this movie. And if you have seen it, tell me what you think. Did it ruin you like it did me?

What is the significance of the "momotaro song" i don't get how a boy born from a peach makes friends with a god then defeats a bunch of demons has any significance to the story?

==My interpretation is==

My interpretation is that unlike some other people's suggestions the Japanese Geisha doll is rather a metaphor for Lisa rather than actually being Lisa in a possible hallucination by Michael. From this illuminates a very self involved Michael who treats Lisa mainly like a toy who he begins to fancy because it was interesting and readily available but easily throws away once he finds its flaws. It's very interesting that there are "geisha" feature to the doll a profession in older Japan where men would run away from their families to these extremely dressed up women not necessarily for sex but to engage in a shallow relationship based on mutual gain.

Michael fails to see the intrinsic value of people and finds little value or puts little effort in the people he meets even the ones he has a deep relationship with like his son or wife. He is very indifferent to his wife and son and would easily leave them at the drop of a hat, he had no interest in what the taxi driver had to say and put no effort in engaging with anyone not just the driver. Michael sees people under the same voice because each one is just a customer (him being a customer service consultant) he puts no value towards them other than at a transactional level and formalities, he puts no effort in engaging with people or forming quality conversations.

Perhaps Anomalisa is not necessarily a comment on love lives but rather a comment on how to love the people in our lives. Where Michael is the "customer service consultant" Kaufman plays the role of the "loving people consultant" we should value the conversation with the friendly taxi driver, we should put energy and thought to the gifts we give our kids or anyone dear to us, we should try to look at the content of persons and what they are saying rather than becoming infatuated with their interesting characteristics but fail to value the real person behind them like with Lisa. This makes Michael's disastrous speech in the conference very ironic because Michael says "Be friendly smile what does it cost you? Look for what is special about each individual focus on that in every conversation. Our time is limited we forget that, death comes and that's it soon as if we've never existed. Remember there is someone out there for everyone, someone to love, REMEMBER THAT EVERY PERSON YOU SPEAK TO NEEDS LOVE" for customer service but he fails to truly love the people around him even those dear to him. Michael talks about loving and valuing people as a customer service consultant but fails to do so as a member of the human race. This why Lisa for that brief moment was an anomaly: the only person Michael was able to love and display actions of love to in the film, this feeds on to Michael's nightmare it points out that Michael is able to love Lisa but fails to love anyone else (note how the bellboy appears again in old age in his nightmare). His indifference and lack of interest to other human beings, his lack of effort into them this is the true root of Michael's loneliness, he does not put effort into people and therefore fails to to gain a true genuine human connection with them.

Anomalisa is about the universal human trait of loving people: loving your wife, loving your friends, loving your children and especially strangers people of whom you do not even know. It's not about loving one woman at all but rather loving all of man(humanity) like they were the "goddess of heaven" which for a brief moment was the fabled Anomalisa the only person Michael showed love to in the entire film.

The next, 90 minute movie we are going to be watching is .

I know nothing about this movie aside from the fact Charlie Kaufman made it and it's beautiful stop motion. So, obviously, I'm 100% on board and excited to check it out. It's the FOURTH movie of his we have watched for the film club, and for that, I'm thankful.

Please, check it out and let us know what you think about it. Love you. Praise Cinema.

A lot of great discussion has taken place around this film, and I'm really glad to be able to have seen the film and contribute at all, so I'll just start by saying that.

I've made public my view that, if authorial intention has any bearing on the discussion whatsoever, I don't believe Michael is intended to by "sympathetic"; what I mean by that is, while he's greatly compelling and I believe we can all identify with him to some extent, that the audience isn't meant to apologize for him, to justify his behavior and to "be on his side".

The textual evidence I would use to support such a claim is, first and foremost, that the first-person narration suggests we are getting not some neutral interpretation of the world (as if such a thing even exists), but Michael's view of the world. We know that Michael experiences his own voice and character as unique in a sea of similarity. We know that he has a history of "abandoning" people, and that he is readily considering doing so again. We know that he is desperate, literally cracking up, and grasping for something to help him hold himself together. We know that he cheats on his wife and that, at the end of the film, nothing has really changed for him personally.

We know that Michael hears Lisa's voice as "unique". At the very moment when everything REALLY starts to go all wonky with him, when he starts to lose control––at this very moment, he's offered an escape: Lisa. His brain, his first-person perspective, latches onto something to keep from...what?

This is where I argue that it's to keep from having to do the hard work of change. It's himself he hates, and his brain clings to Lisa as an easy option, a psychic escape hatch through which he can avoid confronting himself. It's no coincidence that this all occurs while he's looking in the mirror. Lisa is the excuse to avoid facing himself. Consider the rhetorical force of the realization that what Michael was really on the verge of was not a "crack up", but a "breakthrough".

And so but the thing that Michael, and even the audience, myself included, has the hardest time realizing––the sort of logical LEAP you have to make––is that it's not just that Michael behaves the way he does because he feels bad; no, the REAL psychological truth of his behavior is that he feels bad so he can continue behaving the way he does. You have to flip the causality around. Michael can be forgiven for wanting to escape, but he fails to see how the shitty way he feels is an unconscious choice he makes that ALLOWS him the psychological breathing room to continue doing the same things he's been doing. Feeling shitty is the psychic payment he trades for another ride on the merry-go-round.

Maybe someone can point me in the right direction. I really wanted to like this movie. Synecdoche, New York is my favorite film, I love Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and every so often I listen to because it displays to me a level of sincerity and humanity that I find personally inspiring. But this film just felt hollow and simple and slow and obvious to me, and I'm surprised by the positive reception it's getting. Perhaps through more discussion I could like it more, so let me get right into it, starting with why I disagree with the popular criticisms of the movie, moving onto my take on the movie, what I liked, and finishing with why I didn't like it overall. Then, hopefully, someone can tell me whether my interpretation is incorrect or if it just isn't my cup of tea.

My disagreement with criticisms

A lot of people's complaints about Anomalisa are how unlikable Michael Stone is. Personally, I love unlikable protagonists. My favorite type of story is one where the characters are terrible and learn nothing, and through this the audience either gets a laugh or learns something themselves, like As I Lay Dying or Synecdoche, New York. So that isn't my complaint at all; almost every Kaufman movie has an unlikable and/or self-obsessed protagonist. I didn't mind that Michael was unlikable and I think it was very much intentional and sort of one of the core elements of the movie.

A lot of other people complain about the decision to make all of the faces and voices the same. I don't mind this at all. It's art - you can do whatever the hell you want if it means something. I like aberrations from the norm in potentially off-putting ways for the sake of making a statement. And I thought it was a pretty clever idea, for the most part.

My take on the movie

So, what did I get from the movie? It seemed to me to be about a self-obsessed man who thinks he's amazing and thinks the world is a dull hellhole full of people who are all the same, desperately searching for a genuine human connection at the expense of his wife and child (and the people he leaves heartbroken in his wake) but failing to do so because of his cynicism and his inability to deal with peoples' flaws. He is enamoured with novelty and whenever he thinks he can find an escape from the monotony of his regular life he latches onto it until he realizes that that novelty, too, is just like everything and everyone else. All of the faces and voices are the same because, to him, everyone is exactly the same. His (also the name of the hotel he stays at) is a result of him being a cynical ass and has a physical manifestation in the art direction of the movie. There is a beautiful irony and appropriateness to the fact that he is famous for revolutionizing customer service: he gives advice on how everyone is a unique human being with their own thoughts and feelings, and yet he clearly doesn't believe it himself; yet customer service, which is really about putting on a mask and following a formula to achieve a desired outcome from human interaction, seems to be his sole method of interpersonal communication for the most part (except for Lisa). He desperately wants a human connection but gets angry at even casual attempts at connection (like the cab driver or the bellhop in the hotel). His dreams reveal all of this to an extent (he feels everyone is in love with him; everyone reveals themselves to actually all be the same person; he is horrified at the idea of his "mask" falling off his face).

Finally he finds someone, anyone, that he thinks could give him a reprieve from all of this: Lisa. Some people critique her as a "manic pixie dream girl." Some people say the whole movie is a critique of the idea of a "manic pixie dream girl." But I don't really think it's either of those. Lisa isn't a manic pixie dream girl or a stand-in for one in order to comment on it. In reality Lisa is a fully fleshed-out character, and (intentionally) not a really special or interesting one. Looking at her objectively she's actually probably average or slightly below average. The movie makes a point to show that she isn't particularly attractive (she says so herself, and one of her identifying characteristics is a facial scar) or intelligent (again, she says so herself, saying she needed a dictionary to read a book about customer service) or talented (her singing is not particularly good - she can't even hit the low notes) or deep (she identifies with a lame pop song and doesn't have particularly intellectual interests) or confident (she is always getting embarrassed and putting herself down). But she's also not a "manic pixie dream girl." Actually she seems to be just fine, as a normal person: she has a typical job, and a friend, and has pretty mundane interests, albeit a low self-esteem. So why does Michael take interest in her? Just out of some deluded belief that she is "different," maybe because she was in the right place at the right time, or he hadn't heard a voice like hers before. But he doesn't even really care about her or what she says: he just wants to hear her talk, about anything at all. He robs her of her identity in his mind by not even calling her by her real name: he stresses that she is Anomalisa, because it is more important to him that she is an anomaly than that she is Lisa. And once he has had sex with her, and he starts to see her flaws (like scraping the fork against her teeth or talking with her mouth full), he immediately starts to feel as if she isn't actually special after all. And then, once again, he is the only one that's special, with a unique face and voice.

So perhaps I'm wrong about all of this, and a bit off base. After all, I wasn't 100% certain what the deal was with the scene where he is seeing his face go all crazy in the bathroom mirror. But to me that feels like the general gist of the movie. A character study of a self-obsessed asshole who thinks everyone and everything is boring, who takes advantage of a kind and innocent girl because he thinks it will give him an escape, but ultimately ends up back in the prison of his own boring life. Perhaps it is just a character study. Maybe it's about loneliness. Or individuality. How the former is self-imposed and the latter is arbitrary. Or maybe it's about love, the search for novelty, or how difficult it is to be a man with high standards who can't stand the regular. That's all fine.

What I liked

And there are definitely a lot of things I liked about the movie, especially now that I am thinking about it rather than watching it. All of the grand conceits and ideas are, I think, actually rather intelligent and courageous. It is, like all of Kaufman's writing, rather impressive in its interweaving of concepts or big-picture stuff. Him being a sort of motivational speaker for customer service employees, the whole world being made of puppets with faces comprised of individual parts, all of the voices being the same, it all comes together, on paper, pretty nicely. And the cinematography (I guess?) is really spot on. I loved all of the shots and transitions. The animation is beautiful and impressive, perhaps the best stop-motion I have ever seen; in the scene where Lisa falls and hits her head on the ground and Michael runs over to help her up I was struck by just how natural the movements looked. And, like everything Kaufman does, there is this bare humanity at its core, which I can't help but adore and respect. Like always Kaufman stares into his own inner darkness and the inner darkness of humanity in general and presents it for us with a sensitivity and self-awareness that is both sympathetic and gently, sadly condemning at the same time. The sex scene was incredibly uncomfortable, but it was also incredibly real (although a bit short for complete verisimilitude?). It captured all of the potentially awkward but also maybe kind of cute parts of it (head-bumping, shifting to get comfortable, getting and receiving direction) very well, in a way that somehow felt more authentic because it wasn't real actors, if that makes any sense. And there were some elements that were definitely funny. The need for Cincinnati-ans to latch onto mundane things like chili and a zoo as part of their cultural identity was funny. Michael adjusting the water in the shower, struggling to figure out which button would order room service, and needing to take a golf cart to drive from one end of an office to the other were all funny as well.

Why I didn't like it

Yet something felt incredibly off to me. The movie felt like it didn't have enough content. Like it ended too abruptly. And not because things weren't happily resolved: actually I think the final image of Michael staring at the Japanese sex doll was poignant and wonderful. I think a large part of it, from the get-go, was the pacing. Everything felt incredibly dragged out. Everything just moved so damn slowly. The walking through the hallway, getting the ice from the ice machine, lighting cigarettes, getting dressed or undressed, looking up food to order, it all seemed to take forever. And perhaps it was intentional to really show how mundane life is. But to me it just didn't work. The card in the door was relatively funny, but was just emblematic to me of things taking too long in the movie. Walking to the basement, through the hallways, opening doors, going to the office, getting in and turning on the golf cart, going the wrong way with it before driving around the hole in the office, finally getting there and turning it off and walking to the desk - it all felt unnecessarily padded. Kaufman generally doesn't waste even a minute in his screenplays, and a lot of these shots and scenes felt like they were there for a single, unspectacular reason. Even the dialogue seemed to trickle out slowly, like there were just too much space between the lines, which made it feel more awkward and unnatural than it needed to, even if that were the point. I honestly believe this could have been cut down to 60 minutes and it would have been an improvement. As it is it felt like things were just being shown so we could sit and contemplate their meaning for too long.

I want to stress how much I love Kaufman. I am still an enormous fan in any case, even if I can't be convinced that this movie wasn't a misstep. But the brilliance I saw in Synecdoche, New York feels like it's missing here, or woefully diluted. Synecdoche was this enormous urban epic about self-obsession, art, love, life, death, fear, and identity. There were layers of meaning to it. It was to me a surreal masterpiece. From the replica city built inside the warehouse to the microscopic art made by Cotard's ex-wife, everything in it seemed to serve a plethora of purposes narratively, comically, and symbollically, and it all finally came back to its central rumination on life. Being John Malkovich was for sure a sort of weird comedy that was Kaufman really first getting his handle on his signature style, but even then almost every single detail was there to serve multiple purposes, all centered around ideas of identity and control (with Malkovich, the puppets, the gender issues, and so on). In Anomalisa it just felt like it came up short. The jokes felt sort of independent of the meaning. The Cincinatti Zoo poster was funny, and I guess it had something to do with identity, but it feels like a stretch to say it ties in with the movie's themes; the buttons on the phone, the shower scene, it feels contrived to say that they fed into the central ideas of Anomalisa. It just felt to me like disparate parts kind of dragged out a little too long. As an intense lover of Synecdoche, New York I don't think I'm allowed to use pretension as a criticism of a movie, but Anomalisa's lingering, slow pace, focusing on a very simple plot and theme, felt to me like it was trying to squeeze more out of less content than anything else Kaufman has done before.

I think it was a much smaller idea than what Kaufman usually goes for. And somehow it felt, in this instance, like he sacrificed along with his grandiosity of plot his depth of meaning. I'm thinking about a few movies I've seen recently that I don't think do this: Whiplash, Nightcrawler, and Ex Machina. The plots are small. Even the ideas examined aren't necessarily grand. But they are so incredibly tight and well-paced, and fun to watch. There is humor in them that feels like it comes from what it is trying to say (Neiman's ridiculous single-mindedness and Fletcher's intensity, Bloom's creepy determination and lack of morality, and Nathan's unpredictability) and there is tension that drives the plots forward in an expert fashion. I feel like Anomalisa was lacking this to a great extent. I don't need anything to ever even try to be bigger than Synecdoche, New York. But what I was hoping for was something as deep.