Kaufman pulls the strings in Anomalisa

Charlie Kaufman takes the viewer into the world of stop-motion animation with stunning results.

A still from animated movie Anomalisa. Courtesy Starburns Industries

Charlie Kaufman is “a genius”, says actor Tom Noonan. He has “an imagination unlike anyone”, adds actress Jennifer Jason Leigh.

We're talking at the Venice Film Festival, where Kaufman's second directorial outing, Anomalisa, has just screened – and their comments are irrefutable.

Co-directing with Duke Johnson, Anomalisa takes Kaufman into the world of stop-motion animation, with stunning results.

However, the Being John Malkovich writer hasn't suddenly gone child-friendly. Anomalisa's story of Michael, a depressed inspirational speaker who has a brief encounter with Lisa, a shy telesales agent, touches on grown-up themes, is peppered with salty dialogue and features some raunchy scenes. With puppets.

Anomalisa started out as a stage play read live by Noonan, Jason Leigh and David Thewlis. When Johnson received the script, he was thrilled.

“I could see how it could be stop-motion in the sense that it wasn’t specific to anything. And I thought it would be really exciting because it wasn’t like anything I had seen before in that medium.”

Taking “the pulse” of a couple of studios, Johnson realised they’d have to fund the project independently. Studios are conservative by nature, agrees Kaufman.

“As an executive you get fired for making an eccentric decision that doesn’t work,” he says. “If you make a superhero movie and it doesn’t work, you were right to try.” He started talking to Johnson about how to translate the play, following the launch of a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign to raise seed money.

Left alone, with no interference from studios, they were able to follow their vision. Using 3-D-printed facial components, expressive lead characters were created.

Lisa (Jason Leigh) and Michael (Thewlis) look like animated Ron Mueck sculptures. They had to be “fleshy”, says Kaufman. “Not idealised. Just real human.”

In a typically Kaufmanesque touch, Michael is experiencing a psychological condition, based on Fregoli Syndrome (the protagonist of his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York, had Cotard's Syndrome), which causes him to see everyone – except Lisa – as the same person. He is bored by life, which Kaufman regards as depression.

“It’s like a removal from life, which I experience quite often,” he says. “I feel like there’s a numbness that Michael has that I certainly recognise.”

Explaining his approach to writing characters, Kaufman adds: “I think everyone has a mental disorder. I think everyone has got a subjective psychology and just trying to get inside that and create somebody struggling, it seems like the only way to present a human being.”

The movie delves deeply into adult territory, reminding us that animation wasn't always for children. Could Anomalisa mark the start of a return to that trend of more grown-up animated films?

"If it's successful there'll be a hundred Anomalisas," says Kaufman dryly. "Until they stop making money."

One of his strengths is that no matter how strange or surreal his films become, the feelings, anxieties, emotions and fears that characters such as Lisa and Michael experience are always recognisably part of our shared human experience.

“It doesn’t feel foreign,” says Jason Leigh. “He somehow taps into something that is so universal, and yet so out there, that it blows your mind.”