Recensioni de* critic*

It provides a profoundly unsettling experience. As purposefully inert as it is painstakingly animated, the movie simultaneously suggests a vast collective enterprise and a sense of anguished solitude. The tone is not quite comic and not exactly tragic.

From unsexy chat-up lines ("Would you like to get a drink, chat about phone system innovation?") to running gags best left unspoiled to the relish with which the minutiae of hotel life is milked for frustration, Anomalisa is as coloured by external detail as it is fuelled by internal torment. The complexity of the ideas at play is intoxicating both emotionally and intellectually. Kaufman is ahead of his character in delivering the antidote to self-absorption: meaningful communication.

[Kaufman's] hiatus has scarcely diluted his authorial view that modern life is intolerable, a series of humiliating, futile quests to achieve material, artistic romantic or spiritual goals likely to be impeded by the seeker's maladaptive behaviour. Though fellow fatalists Woody Allen (when in Dostoevskian mode) and Todd Solondz occupy similar territory, the arrival of Kaufman's stop-motion drama Anomalisa reiterates the uniqueness of his surreally skewed metaphysical inquiries.

A narrowly neurological interpretation of Anomalisa (i.e., the trouble with Michael is he has a brain lesion) can't account, I don't think, for the profound identification the viewer feels with Michael's experience, or the strong part desire plays in the scheme of his suffering.

[Lisa seems] almost unbelievably pitiful. It is as if, by giving her such a long list of deficiencies, Kaufman and Johnson meant to signal that Lisa's consciousness isn't interesting, deep, or unusual enough to justify letting the film diverge from Michael's point of view and drift into hers. She comes off as a convenient device: pathetic enough to generate sympathy but simple enough not to threaten Michael as the film's center of attention.

Ultimately an inspired marriage of story and form. The awkward intimacy between the characters to which we are privy is constantly confounded by the distancing effect of the puppets, which makes for a restless dynamic, even if Kaufman's thematic landscape doesn't quite reach the profundity of his past work.

The assiduousness inherent in the means of the film's frame-by-frame production suggests the infinity of variegated details that exist beneath the stale surface that Michael takes to be the real world, his loss of love ultimately a loss of curiosity—and this, at least, he doesn't share with his creator. Anomalisa is a fine, poetic, suggestive title, though "Anhedonia" might have done just as well.

As small-scale as it may be, Anomalisa is no less bleak in its wider implications than Synecdoche, no less unsparing in its unflattering view of its anhedonia-ridden protagonist. But as with the greatest works of art, Kaufman's film transcends its depressive trappings and becomes genuinely enlivening in its clear-eyed vision, its hints of absurdist black humor, and the exuberant imagination with which it puts across its bittersweet worldview.

Kaufman's gift for absurdist comedy finds numerous outlets in the minor annoyances and indignities Michael suffers: a garrulous cabbie (Noonan) extolling the wonders of Cincinnati's chili and zoo; indecipherable icons on his hotel room's phone; a visit to a 24-hour "toy store" that's not exactly geared toward children. Most of all, Anomalisa, in common with virtually every film Kaufman has written, struggles to make peace with the knowledge that we are all fundamentally alone.

There's so much beauty and sadness in it, and so many exquisitely conceived scenes (including an impromptu musical performance that ranks with Kaufman's greatest moments), that it would be miserly to underrate it. Whether you leave the film ecstatically impressed, indifferent or disappointed, you will know you've seen something unique. Too many movies speak in a boringly typical storytelling voice. This one speaks in a voice as singular as Lisa's.

While "Anomalisa" is filled with uncomfortably, at times sourly humorous moments, it's also a horror movie about the agonizing, banal surrealism of everyday life. Mr. Kaufman's gift for quotidian horror remains startling; he's a whiz at minor miseries.

Kaufman betrays himself as much with his condescending compassion as with his withering observations. He builds his modest characters as collections of traits that appear as calculated details drawn from life but serving to do nothing but evoke sighs akin to those yielded by pictures of children and pets. The artificial sweetness and gentle satire of his portraits of characters who could be labeled as everyday people is haughty and incurious.