Last night there was one Academy Award win that surprised nobody. And no, I’m not talking about Leo finally getting what we all think of as “recognition”. I’m talking about Inside Out winning best animated feature. But there was another film in the running that deserves a wider consideration, and if I’d have caught it sooner it might have made it into my best films of 2015.

Anomalisa is a stop-motion film following self-help author Michael Stone, a man so disillusioned with his mundane life that he sees everyone he meets as having the same face and voice. On a trip to Cincinnati he stays at a hotel where he wrestles with loneliness, his past, and an encounter with a woman called Lisa, who might be what he needs to snap from his drab existence.

This introspective film was penned by Charlie Kaufman, the creative mind behind Being John Malkovich and one of my personal favourites, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Not only is the dialogue filled with unexpected humour, it’s also painfully real.

The unwanted interactions that Michael endures with a taxi driver and a concierge are familiar to anyone who’s suffered an exhausting day. But when we really get into this character, seeing how he responds to elements from his past and how frustrated he is with his bland life, the film becomes something special.

Even though this is a stop-motion film made with puppets, the characters feel far more real than in most other films I saw last year. It all comes down to how the writing managed to capture not only Michael’s bitterness and disconnection with his peers, but also a harrowing realism in much of the dialogue. So engaging and grounded are these conversational scenes, with Michael displaying a range of authentic expressions, that often we forget that we’re watching a bunch of puppets.

Another part of what grounds these great scenes is an excellent voice performance from David Thewlis. It’s impossible not to hear Michael ache in almost every word he speaks.

Recently I wrote an article about animated films where I criticised the likes of The Good Dinosaur for failing to do anything creative with their animation. Sure, The Good Dinosaur looked beautiful but I don’t want to see an animated film featuring images easily obtainable by camera. Given the simple plot about a man spending a night in a hotel, you might wonder whether the same arguments hold here.

What Anomalisa does is use its animation to support its themes. Michael sees others as all the same, as fake. It heightens our sense of paranoia and asks us what makes a person a person. Are we all unique? Or do we all just feel manufactured?

It’s an incredible accomplishment of animation to create something that feels so real and so human. Even the depiction of sex is uncomfortably genuine. And if your mind is leaping to that glorious sex scene in Team America, I don’t blame you, but be prepared to have what you thought was possible with dolls forever altered.

If you’re a fan of these sorts of cerebral stories, I urge you to check this one out. Think of the loneliness of Her wrapped in a surreal Black Mirror world. While I recently slammed modern animated films for manipulating us into crying, Anomalisa pulls on our heartstrings by offering an experience that’s sickeningly familiar and authentic. You’ll see a quote on all of its posters: “The most human film of the year”. It isn’t an exaggeration.

9-9

(GRADES: Both are out of 10. The left is an objective score based on its artistic merit, the right is how much I personally enjoyed it.)

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