Abnormal is the first animated film directed by Charlie Kaufman, shot in the form of stop motion animation. It is also the first R-rated animation in Oscar history to be nominated for Best Animated Feature, which shows that this is not a film for children. Like his previous works, Kaufman continues to analyze human spiritual consciousness in Disorder. He prefers to add a fantasy that is impossible in real life to complete this analysis, from "Puppet Life", which opened the brain of the protagonist Markovic, to "Adapted Script", which created the twin Nicolas Cage. To the "Eternal Sunshine of a Beautiful Mind" that helped Jim Carrey erase his memory, and to this "Disorder", which expresses the mid-life crisis with "a thousand faces", it is all like this.
Hollywood has no shortage of midlife crisis-themed films. For example, "American Beauty", which warns people with tragedy, and "Life with a Glass of Wine" which ends with a warm comedy. Compared with the Hollywood film tradition that cherishes family and love, most of these films cannot escape from the Hollywood film tradition. The film mainly tells the story of a best-selling author named Michael Stone during a speech in Cincinnati. He meets his ex-girlfriend to ask for her forgiveness. Sha's sales agent, which led to a brief extramarital affair.
The reason why "Disorder" is cold is because of the chaos and disorder it shows from beginning to end.
In the eyes of "abnormal" people, everything around is abnormal, weird and grotesque. From the point of view of the protagonist Michael Stone, Abnormal makes the audience feel this abnormal from the very beginning. The film opens with loud human voices, and no one can make out what is being said under the black screen, which is exactly what Stone can hear. Then we will find that, with the exception of Stone, the characters in the film have the same face and voice (both dubbed by Tom Lornan) despite having different hairstyles and clothes, and this is what the film hides Behind the narrative reflects the biggest motif of Stone's psychology. In his eyes, all people are the same, and no one can comfort his lonely heart - not even his ex-girlfriend Bella.
This loneliness is often accompanied by sexual passion. In Stone's case, it first manifested in his desire to seek forgiveness from his ex-girlfriend he hadn't seen in eleven years. When he asked Bella to go back to the hotel room together, he was finally rejected. He came to the sex shop looking for toys that would bring comfort. Stone is still very low. At this moment, he met Lisa who was different - she had a face that was completely different from everyone, and a voice that belonged to women like nature. Lisa's beautiful voice immediately penetrated Stone's heart and brought him short-lived comfort. However, the passions that arise from physical desires are fleeting. Stone's real fear actually comes from the deep loneliness and the resulting lack of security. He was still having nightmares. After a brief hilarious night, Lisa's voice in front of Stone changed, becoming like everyone else.
The way the stop-motion animation is presented blends just right with the emptiness and alienation the film is meant to convey. The discontinuity of frame-by-frame playback and the imbalance of the proportions of the characters naturally have a sense of closure, and the rhythm is slow and suffocating. The character modeling is also "abnormal", and we can clearly see the obvious gaps in the doll's side face, temples, and bridge of the nose. Once, Stone looked at himself in the mirror after taking a shower, and his features twitched erratically like a runaway machine or a stuck tape. We started to worry if his face, everyone's face, would fall off at some point, like a machine in disrepair. The audience's psychology seems to be connected with such a design by a few thin threads.
In fact, even if there is no background theme of midlife crisis, the anxiety and disorder in the film are encountered by all of us. Charlie Kaufman, through his extraordinary sensibility, has stirred up countless wonderful ripples of inspiration on the surface of peaceful life.
Whether an abnormality is an abnormality or a normality, the answer lies in everyone's heart.
View more about Anomalisa reviews
