Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa and Adult Depression

Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa is, in many ways, a counterpart to Inside Out. Both are Animated films released in 2015 that use the medium of animation to provide a visual metaphor for mental health, focusing on depression. However, Inside Out is designed to explain these topics to children, while Anomalisa is much more adult, not just in dealing with topics like work and sex and how they influence it, but also in how they approach their central character. Riley from Inside Out is relatable and many of her experiences, universal. Michael, the protagonist of Anomalisa, is a nasty, callous man whose depression actively makes him unpleasant to be around, so much so that his treatment of Lisa, the first person in a long time to light up his life, seems downright out of character. But the film is potent in using its unique Stop-Motion Puppetry and limited voice acting to put the audience in Michael’s shoes to both dislike him, and to understand him.

The way Anomalisa sets the mood and feel doesn’t just lie in the puppetry, but also in vocal performances - outside of the two central characters, everyone in the film is voiced by the same actor, Tom Noonan, regardless of age or gender. Voice Actors in animated film usually rely on broad, exaggerated, and unique performances, so much so that in “The Art of Voice Acting”, James Alburger claims that for voicing animated characters, “The most effective character voices are those that slightly exaggerate the attitudes and emotions of the character you are portraying, or that take a small quirk or idiosyncrasy and blow it out of proportion”, so by having one character give the same voice to most characters, and that voice be deliberately boring, forces the audience to empathize with the main character experiencing that depression and inability to connect with people. The vocal performance Noonan provides is deliberately tiresome, and the predominance of it, surrounding much of the film, with very little relief, is a potent filmic metaphor for introversion-based depression - no matter how kindly anyone acts, it’s still impossible not to perceive them as draining and harming your wellbeing, and there’s still no escape from social interactions, which is what makes this form so hard to get over. Living your life at all becomes an unpleasant drain.

The air of artifice created by the use of stop-motion animation and puppetry in the film is potent for similar reasons. The Mise-en-scène does not have any real actors, instead being occupied entirely by inorganic props, and while the main characters have detailed and complex models that frequently look human like, the background characters are basic and doll-like, falling into the uncanny valley. In his study of the uncanny valley, Frank Pollick noted that “(...) although the uncanny valley is modeled to lie along a continuum of realism, the appreciation of what is being viewed lies at a categorical boundary between humans and machines”, and the film goes to great efforts to put Michael and Lisa on the human side, but the other puppets on the other. This furthers the void between Michael and the world - he’s surrounded by synthetic robots, impossible to connect with as he simply can’t see them as human, and while this is a callous view, it’s one unfortunately common with long-term depression. Like the vocal similarities, this also forces the audience to empathize with Michael’s situation, no matter how cruel his character can be. A nightmare sequence brings this straight to the forefront of the film: Michael is directly confronted by Puppet characters designed with harsh, inhuman faces whose even fall apart around him, and want to be the focus of his attentions instead of Lisa. This represents Michael’s antipathy for those that care for him, and his drive for the magic solution that Lisa can provide.

However, at the climax of the film’s main story line, Lisa’s unique luster begins to face for Michael, and he starts perceiving her just like every other character in the story. In this scene, the real purpose of the film becomes clear: Showing the genuine damage that Michael’s mental state is doing to his life. He didn’t love Lisa because she was a great person, but simply because she provided a release from the rest of his life, and when that wasn’t true anymore, he tossed her aside. Michael isn’t seeking actual treatment or making lifestyle changes - he is, as the nightmare said, looking for a magic solution, to the detriment of everyone else in his life, including his wife and child. The film pulls no punches in this regard, showing that depression can take a genuine toll on you as a person, and asks us to balance our sympathy for his problems, which, in many ways, his actions are perpetuating, with our sympathy for those he’s hurting.

References

1. Alburger, J. R. (2002). The art of voice acting: The craft and business of performing for voice-over. Boston: Focal Press.
2. Pollick, F. E. (2010). In Search of the Uncanny Valley. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering User Centric Media, 69-78.