Kritiken

Here is an adaptation so inspired, so simple and so frictionless in its transformation of the source material that it's almost a miracle.

The predominantly black-and-white animation is used to amusing effect as Satrapi gently pokes fun at her youthful exuberance and innocence, making serious political points easy to swallow. The lack of sense of direction is the film's only let-down.

Persepolis is at once a confessional autobiography, historical re-enactment, graphic art object, and deeply involving contemporary story about a girl’s coming-of-age while circumventing not only the usual pitfalls of adolescence but also the enforced repression brought on by Iran’s Islamic revolution of the Eighties.

“Persepolis” is frequently somber, but it is also whimsical and daring, a perfect expression of the imagination’s resistance to the literal-minded and the power-mad, who insist that the world can be seen only in black and white.

Persepolis – in French with English subtitles – is like nothing you’ve ever seen in animation. It’s a mind-blower. Using a few deft strokes of her black pen, Satrapi brings a whole world to life.

The pleasingly simple, hand-drawn characters, and flat, often abstractly patterned backgrounds show the influence of everything from Charles Schulz to German Expressionism to Persian miniature painting to shadow puppetry. But the resulting mood is never cerebral or self-consciously postmodern.

"Persepolis" is all about the ways people find to get on with life, even when their governments work hard to prevent them from doing so. It's also, quite simply, a resonant and universal story about coming of age. This is a sturdily poetic movie, rendering in black-and-white a world where nothing ever is.

Fears that the often hard-hitting Persepolis would become cutesified and watered down in this feature-length animated adaptation are mostly unfounded: directed by Satrapi herself with the help of underground comic artist Vincent Paronnaud, the film is remarkably faithful to the spirit and the black-and-white look of the artist’s epic coming-of-age tetralogy.

This is a delightful, curious film that indulges in both the personal and the political and provides a potted history of modern Iran through one woman’s experience.