“Looking at it in retrospect, it seemed like it was meant to happen. But while you’re going through it, it’s like: This is never going to happen. This is never going to happen. This is never going to happen,” Charlie Kaufman tells The New York Times of the 10-year process to develop and complete his new stop-motion animation, Anomalisa. He adds the final product is “a combination of happenstance and then figuring out what to do with it — some of it definitely is accidental.”
Consider it a happy accident, then, as it turns out to be one of the best films of the year. We said in our Venice review, “What exactly has been brewing in Charlie Kaufman’s head for the last 7 years? This heart-wrenchingly worrying film, it seems. After a slew of near misses, the singular screenwriter-turned-director is back with Anomalisa, his first film since the well-received but financially calamitous Synecdoche, New York in 2008. Based on a “sound play” developed by directors Kaufman and Duke Johnson, with input from longtime Coen bros. composer Carter Burwell, it is a coarsely unsettling, tragically profound, and often quite funny stop-frame animated picture that focuses on two lost souls who meet in a faceless hotel and share a one-night stand.”
Ahead of a December limited release and January wide release, the first trailer has now landed, thanks to Paramount. Check it out below, along with the poster, for the film starring Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan, and David Thewlis.
Michael Stone, husband, father and respected author of “How May I Help You Help Them?” is a man crippled by the mundanity of his life. On a business trip to Cincinnati, where he’s scheduled to speak at a convention of customer service professionals, he checks into the Fregoli Hotel. There, he is amazed to discover a possible escape from his desperation in the form of an unassuming Akron baked goods sales rep, Lisa, who may or may not be the love of his life. A beautifully tender and absurdly humorous dreamscape, from the brilliant minds of Charlie Kaufman (SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK) and Duke Johnson (“Community” episode, Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas), this stop-motion animation wonder features the vocal cast of Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan and David Thewlis and a stirring strings-based score by Carter Burwell.
Anomalisa arrives on December 30th.