Screenwriter turned director Charlie Kaufman is known for many a mindbending contemporary classic —he wrote Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind,” Spike Jonze’s “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” and directed his own feature “Synecdoche, New York” starring the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. If there’s one overarching theme in his work, it’s the surely the crushing existential weight of life itself.
This certainly appears to be the thread Kaufman is picking up on with “Anomalisa,” his first venture into the world of stop-motion animation: it’s a fable about a motivational speaker seeking to transcend his monotonous existence.
Voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan and David Thewlis, “Anomalis” is co-directed with Duke Johnson (“Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole”) and frequent Coen Bros. collaborator Carter Burwell has written the score. The film opens in limited release on December 30th. Watch the first trailer below.
