Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Animated Feature 2015

The Contenders:

Anomalisa
Boy and the World
Inside Out (winner)
Shaun the Sheep Movie
When Marnie Was There

We're All Puppets

Films: Anomalisa
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

There are movies that frustrate me. The whole string of them is probably too long to mention, but the fact that it happens is worth mentioning. Anomalisa is the latest in that list. This is a movie that by all rights I’m supposed to like. The fact that an R-rated animated movie was nominated for Best Animated Feature is the sort of thing I’m supposed to like as well; I’ve commented in the past something to the effect that Best Animated Feature is essentially “Best Kids’ Movie” every year and that the Academy never looks beyond that for this category. Here they did. That’s good—it expands the category in a meaningful way. And yet there’s something about Anomalisa that I find difficult. It took me far too long to get through this movie, and I’m still not sure why.

Anomalisa is a story of a loss of connection from reality and the world and a desperate search for that connection. More prosaically, it’s an exploration of the Fregoli delusion, a strange combination of paranoia and persecution complex in which the person suffering the delusions beings to believe that different people are, in fact, the same person in disguise. This is ground that writer/director Charlie Kaufman touched on in that brief “Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich” sequence in Being John Malkovich. In that respect, it’s not hard to see a direct line between Kaufman’s earlier work and this one.