If you’re really good at showing the honest, tangible fragility of human beings in the films that you write or direct, why would you make a stop-motion movie with puppets? Not only that, but the puppet characters in Charlie Kaufman‘s Anomalisa are obviously puppets. The seams on the puppets’ interchangeable faces are clearly visible, and some artifacts of the animation process aren’t concealed. Maybe it’s due to the fact that all the characters in protagonist Michael Stone’s (David Thewlis) life look and sound the same (portrayed by Tom Noonan). Just like in Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, where Caden Cotard shows a lot of symptoms of Cotard’s syndrome, Stone experiences the Fregoli delusion – the belief that different people are all the same person.

Floris Groenewald

Floris sometimes writes things when he’s not watching movies or playing video games or editing videos or folk-rock singing/songwriting.

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