Anomalisa

Directors Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson at the 2015 Fantastic Fest

The first version of Anomalisa was written and performed in 2005 for the Los Angeles run of "Theater of the New Ear", described as "a concert for music and text, or a set of 'sound plays'" by Carter Burwell, who commissioned and scored them.[8] It was a double bill with Kaufman's Hope Leaves the Theater, and replaced Sawbones, by the Coen Brothers, from the earlier New York run, after that play's actors were unavailable.[9] This Anomalisa was credited to the pen name Francis Fregoli, a reference to the Fregoli delusion, a disorder centered around the belief that different people are in fact a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise.[5] The 2005 performance had Thewlis and Leigh sitting on opposite sides of the stage, with Noonan in the middle; Burwell conducted the Parabola Ensemble, and there was a foley artist.[8][10]

Kaufman was initially opposed to turning the play into an animated film, saying that the play had "a disconnect between what's being said on stage and what the audience is seeing – there's Tom playing all these characters, there's Jennifer and David having sex while they're really just standing across the stage from each other and moaning. You'd lose that". The film was reinvented, although its script was described by The Guardian as "virtually the same" as that of the original play.[11]

The film's production company, Starburns Industries, sought funding on Kickstarter to "produce this unique and beautiful film outside of the typical Hollywood studio system," where the company believed the film would be inevitably changed from its initial conception. Initially pitched as a short film "approximately 40 minutes in length", the team set a funding goal of $200,000. By the end of the campaign, 5,770 backers had pledged $406,237 to the project.[12] After the success of the Kickstarter initiative, additional funding was secured by the film's production company, Starburns Industries, and the film was expanded to feature length.[13]

The puppets were created with 3D printers,[14] with multiple copies of each character. Eighteen Michaels and six Lisas were created.[15] Johnson recounted that the team was told that such realistic puppets would be "disturbing and off-putting", but disagreed, saying that the nature of stop-motion film, with human hands moving puppets for each frame, brought "organic life" to the medium.[11] One goal of the film was for viewers to "forget they were looking at something animated and just get wrapped up in the scene", he said; "the challenge we felt with so much animated stuff is that you're always conscious of the animation, and we kept asking, 'What if we could escape that? What would it be like?'".[14]

Kaufman and Johnson have described the process of stop-motion animation as "laborious" and found challenges in making the puppets look lifelike and relatable.[16] Animator Dan Driscoll said they found people on whom to model the puppets, studied human movement and facial expressions to produce a precise result, created the puppets and built the sets, and finally placed the puppets on the sets and moved them frame by frame to create the illusion of movement.[16] Kaufman said the medium of stop-motion underpins the narrative of Anomalisa by drawing attention to small details viewers would not notice in a live-action film.[17]

The film was in production for more than two years.[15]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 91% based on 278 reviews, with an average rating of 8.4/10. The website's critical consensus reads: "Anomalisa marks another brilliant and utterly distinctive highlight in Charlie Kaufman's filmography, and a thought-provoking treat for fans of introspective cinema."[26] The film also has a weighted average score of 88 out of 100 on Metacritic based on 46 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".[27]

In Time Out David Calhoun awarded the film five out of five stars and wrote, "It's what you imagine might have happened if Charlie Kaufman had got his hands on Up in the Air or Lost in Translation."[28] Drew McWeeny of Hitfix called it "the most shattering experiment yet from Charlie Kaufman" and graded it an A+.[29] LA Weekly's Amy Nicholson gave the film an A and wrote, "Kaufman is taking our brains apart and showing us the gears."[30] The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw gave the film five out of five, naming it his film of the week, and wrote: "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 ... Is there anyone else in the movies doing such unique and extraordinary work?"[31]

Observer critic Mark Kermode gave Anomalisa three out of five, writing: "Sometimes it falls apart ... But there's something magical about the malaise which raises this above mere misanthropy—a heightened sense of fragile life that perhaps only puppets could hope to achieve."[32] Stephanie Zacharek of Time wrote: "Once you start reckoning with Anomalisa's obsession with self-absorption, the novelty of this one-man pity party begins to wear off."[33]

Anomalisa was listed on numerous critics' top ten lists for 2015.[34]