By Sandi Weiler

Anomalisa, despite being stop-motion, is one of those films that feels more real than reality. Directors Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman show their extreme expertise as storytellers, creating an innovative and striking look at the tragedies of human connection, loneliness, and individuality. Michael Stone (voiced by David Thewlis), a jaded, unfriendly author with a bestselling book ironically about customer service, is in Cincinnati on business for one day. Everything around him is a drone of white noise, identical, generic voices (all voiced by Tom Noonan) and mask-like faces. He tries and fails to rekindle a lost connection with an ex lover; but then he hears Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), “someone else.” Her voice stands out to him immediately, which makes him feel a deep connection to her. Meeting her is like a redemption: he sees her as the key to overcoming his deep-rooted issues with establishing lasting connections with the people around him. The film is extremely well crafted. The characters breathe (literally, watch and you can see their chests move); they live in a world so different and yet so parallel to our own that it makes for a very surreal and intimate experience. Kaufman makes use of a poetic dreaminess that give the film the feeling of being a story in the back of Michael’s mind, or in the viewer’s mind, a sort of collective unconscious terror expressed as a semi-coherent succession of events. Certain phrases of dialogue stand out like echoed words you remember upon waking from a dream, phrases that run constantly through the back of our subconscious. “Our time is limited, we forget that.”Watching Anomalisa is like watching Sofia Coppola’s classic Lost in Translation, except replacing Coppola’s melancholic nostalgia-for-the-unknown with a tragic hopelessness offset by a twinkle of humor (despite the weight of the film’s mood, there are lots of funny moments). Michael Stone, in his world, is just as displaced and isolated as Bob Harris in Tokyo. Kaufman, however takes Michael’s isolation and turns it into something both universal and unique. Our consciousness allows us to view the mechanical nature of humanity through this film both as outsiders and insiders, and that is the true genius of Anomalisa.