Anomalisa · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A hairline runs across the puppet's forehead, just above the brows. There's a second one under the eyes. It's there in the first shot of Anomalisa and it never goes away.

That line is the seam where the two halves of a 3D-printed face meet. Laika built the pipeline on Coraline and spends real money erasing that seam frame by frame in post; the paint-out is one of the standing costs of prestige stop-motion. Duke Johnson, who came up through television stop-motion and went to Charlie Kaufman with the idea, inherited the entire Laika pipeline and simply declined the erasure. Most of what the film knows is inside that one refusal.

Start with what stop-motion actually is, because Deleuze gives you a way to see it that the medium's own publicity never will. Cinema's break with painting and sculpture, he argued after Bergson, was the any-instant-whatever: a camera samples motion at equidistant, ordinary moments, mechanically, with no opinion about which of them matters. Painting had given us the privileged instant, the javelin at the top of its arc, the pose that stands in for a whole action. Film gave up the pose and got movement, and then time.

Stop-motion never made that break. Not one frame of Anomalisa is a sample of anything. Every frame is a pose: set by hand, held, shot, nudged, shot again, at a rate of a few usable seconds per animator per week. The faces are more extreme still. They aren't expressions but a printed library of discrete expressions, swapped between exposures. The film is thousands of privileged instants running at twenty-four a second, impersonating continuity.

And then Joe Passarelli photographs the whole thing like a small independent drama about a man at a conference. Handheld inflection, rack focus, lens flare, focus falling off behind a shoulder in a narrow corridor, long takes where animation would cut because cutting is cheaper. That is the accidental grammar of a camera that was really present, aimed at bodies that were really moving. It is the any-instant-whatever manufactured one pose at a time by people who know exactly what an unposed instant looks like. Wes Anderson had already put live-action lens logic on puppets in Fantastic Mr. Fox. Anomalisa takes that grammar into a hotel room, where it stops being delightful.

Worth pausing on Bazin, since animation is usually where his argument gets waved off. Bazin's realism rested on the photograph's physical bond to whatever stood in front of the lens: the image is an imprint, not a drawing. Cartoons have no such bond, because nothing was there. Stop-motion does. A puppet was there, lit by an actual lamp, in a room the size of a closet. It is the one animation that keeps Bazin's contract, and the seam is the receipt. Laika paints it out so the object looks like it had no maker. Anomalisa leaves it in and lets you watch a made thing being photographed.

Now the sound, which came first. Kaufman wrote this as a sound play for Carter Burwell's Theater of the New Ear, actors at microphones, live orchestra, foley performed in full view of the audience. The apparatus was already on the table.

Everyone in the film except Michael and Lisa speaks with Tom Noonan's voice. The cab driver. The voice on the phone when he calls home. Everyone at the conference. Men, women, children, all of them Noonan. Deleuze has a term for a collective rendered as a single affective unit rather than a set of individuals: the dividual. He's usually talking about Eisenstein's crowds, a mass that feels as one body. Anomalisa applies it to the entire species minus one man, and delivers it through the ear.

Two consequences. One is an audiovisual disjunction, where the voice and the visible body report different facts about who this is. Deleuze finds it in Duras, where voices drift free of the people onscreen. Here it's tighter and more nauseating, because the wrong voice comes out of the right mouth, perfectly in sync. The other is that the cut loses its ordinary job. A cut to a new speaker normally pays you in a new timbre. Garret Elkins's editing abandons conventional dialogue rhythm because that payment never arrives, and the exchanges flatten into a drone. An editor cutting deliberately to produce tedium is a rare thing.

Michael can do nothing about any of it, and that's the hinge. In the older cinema, Deleuze's movement-image, a character perceives a situation and acts, and the action resolves the situation. When that circuit breaks you get a pure sound situation: someone who can only listen. Michael listens. He can't argue with the drone, can't locate it, can't get out from under it. He flies to Cincinnati, gives his talk, spends a night with a woman whose voice is different, and goes home more or less as he was. Deleuze calls that shape the balade, the trip that transforms nothing. This is a feature-length business trip with a full crisis of the action-image running inside it.

The Fregoli is built with obsessive banality: room-service tray, minibar, shower controls, ice machine, bad art, sedative browns and institutional golds. Deleuze's any-space-whatever is usually a bombed lot, a void, space that has stopped organizing anyone's action. A corporate hotel at night does identical work on better carpet. What makes it feel wrong is the craft: somebody sculpted that soap dispenser.

Deleuze says the close-up is the face, and that the face works two ways. It can be a smooth contour reflecting one quality, or a set of features where small movements build intensity. The Fregoli's supporting puppets are engineered as pure contour, one facial architecture with minor variation. Lisa has a scar she keeps under her hair. That's a feature, a trait in a world of finish, and it quietly tells you what Michael is shopping for, which is not a person but a difference.

The hotel's geography is kept legible and consistent, corridors that actually connect, so when Michael moves through it in a dream state the film reads as breaking a rule rather than changing style. And in the vertiginous sequence, his own face comes apart, the plate detaching as a separate object. Because the seam has been visible since the first shot, that doesn't land as an effect. It lands as arithmetic.

The debts are specific. Jack Skellington's roughly four hundred sculpted heads in The Nightmare Before Christmas put replacement faces on a feature footing; Coraline industrialized them with 3D printing and the paint-out; Mary and Max proved an adult clay feature could run on depressive interiority and voice alone, with no genre engine underneath. Team America posed the R-rated puppet sex scene as a formal problem and answered it as burlesque. Anomalisa takes the same physical impossibility and refuses both the joke and the cutaway, holding the scene in real time with the fumbling and the negotiation left in, because elision is animation's default economy and this film spends where it hurts. Kaufman had built the machine years earlier: the restaurant of Malkoviches, one face and one word on every body.

What it opened up is harder to name than what it owes, and I'd rather not invent successors. What it demonstrated is available to anyone: that a stop-motion feature could be financed by several thousand strangers when no studio would touch it, carry an R rating into the Best Animated Feature race, and treat its own fabrication as the argument instead of the embarrassment. Animation had spent thirty years learning to hide the hand. This one left the hand in the frame and made the visible join the subject.

Which leaves the question the film won't close. Is Lisa an anomaly, or just an interval, the gap before the drone comes back? Michael never finds out either, and the film is honest enough not to tell us whether the problem was ever out there.

Watch the brow next time. The line is always there.