In wonderfully creepy 'Anomalisa,' a stop-motion midlife crisis

NOTE: A version of this review appeared in the Oct. 22, 2015, issue of The Inquirer, when "Anomalisa" premiered as the opening-night selection of the Philadelphia Film Festival.

The singular and stunning Anomalisa - brainchild of Charlie Kaufman, in cahoots with animation director Duke Johnson - begins with a pitch-dark screen and a cacophony of voices: aural detritus, everyday yak. Then, a sun-burnished cloudscape appears, a jet slices through the cumulus, we're inside the plane, and the passengers are all . . . puppets.

In one row, with the darting eyes of a sad, unsatisfied man, sits Michael Stone (the voice of David Thewlis), en route from Los Angeles to a conference in Cincinnati, where he is scheduled as the guest speaker. Michael is the author of a customer-service book, How May I Help You Help Them? We spend the rest of this stop-motion animated tale (yes, the same painstaking process used for Wallace and Gromit and Fantastic Mr. Fox) in his gloomy, doomy, self-loathing head.

And, for a time, in the company of Lisa, an eager-beaver customer-service worker who has driven from Akron with a coworker to hear Stone's talk. Martinis (Michael) and mojitos (Lisa) are downed, an elevator takes them from the hotel bar to his room, and the rest isn't left to anyone's imagination.

Yes, there is puppet sex.

Kaufman is the angsty wordsmith behind Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation - movies that prod and poke the brainpan to disturbing, often comic effect. Kaufman went on to write and direct Synecdoche, New York, the incendiary 2008 Philip Seymour Hoffman opus. In Anomalisa, Kaufman shares directing chores with animator Johnson, creating a lifelike tableau that is at once instantly recognizable and eerily just a little bit off.

Anomalisa offers a portrait of a man in a midlife morass of regret and mundanity. He's in existential crisis (hey, who isn't?!), pulling on cigarettes and pulling up his pants over an unflattering girth.

Part of the creepy genius of Anomalisa - adapted from a Kaufman play (under the nom de plume Francis Fregoli) and funded in no small measure by 5,770 Kickstarter fans - is that its not-quite-lifelike humans both mirror our reality and suggest the tenuous hold we have on it. Things could unhinge at any moment.

Anomalisa's title conjoins the word anomaly with the name of Michael's newfound friend.

"Your voice is like magic," he tells her, and, indeed, as spoken (and sung) by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Lisa's words open up a window that lets Michael look at life - and listen to it - in different, better ways. But odds are that this is a fleeting thing, that all the babble (every other character's voice in the film is that of actor Tom Noonan) will descend on Michael again. His time in Cincinnati is short, his wife and child await at home.

It is, after all, a Charlie Kaufman world. Things can't possibly end well, can they?

StartText

Written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Duke Johnson and Charlie Kaufman. With the voices of David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Noonan. Distributed by Paramount Pictures.

Running time: 1 hour, 30 mins.
Parent's guide: R (profanity, nudity, sex, adult themes).
Playing at: Ritz East.