Persepolis

Young Marjane keeps protesting after everyone’s stopped listening.

Animated movies look more and more like um, un-animated movies. With a little knowledge of what’s difficult in the CGI world, watching an animated film becomes a different experience – beyond the story, you note the scenes in which the animators are flexing their muscles.    Deeply complex mathematical equations make characters move, wrinkles look real, and fuzzy hair wave in the wind. I remember particularly the scene in “Happy Feet” when the penguin jumps off the iceberg into the ocean – this combination of rippling feathers and billowing ocean waves must’ve required algorithms that stretched from here to the North Pole.

The animation in “Persepolis” moves in the quite another direction – away from the hyperreal, into the realm of the stylized, symbolic, and emotional.   Based on the set of graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, this intriguing movie tells the story of a girl coming of age in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.   The animation favors simple line drawings and a plethora of black space, as well as a propensity for abstract, ornately detailed backgrounds, the kind you find in Persian miniature paintings, keeping with the film’s cultural roots.  It’s quite a different experience from watching a Pixar flick, but I can’t think of a better way one could animate mass executions, a bloody war and the rise of a dictatorship.  Hyperrealism’s definitely not an option.

Young Marjane is the only child of progressive parents, who remind us convincingly that Iran hasn’t always been the land of religious radicals with repressive social agendas.  They are educated, independent, and politically engaged, participating in demonstrations and friends with folks routinely thrown in jail.   As an eight-year-old, Marjane doesn’t really understand everything swirling around her, but catches the energy; she marches around the living room shouting “Death to the Shah!”   and when she grows up, wants to be a prophetess.  God visits her regularly in her bedroom, until her uncle is taken prisoner for his political views and executed, at which point she tells God, in no uncertain terms, where to go.

By the time she is 12, everything Western is forbidden, and we watch as she purchases contraband Iron Maiden cassettes from a guy in an overcoat.  Encouraged by her family to be outspoken and opinionated but lacking any sense of when to speak and when to keep her mouth shut, it’s not long before her parents see the need to send her out of the country to get an education.   She is sent to Vienna, but is miserable there; puberty plus expatriation is a volatile combination.   She comes back home and finds it almost as hard to live there.  Home is a state of mind, and home no longer exists.

The middle section of the movie drags a little, as the Islamic government tightens its grip.   It’s hard to keep track of all the people who die around her, all of them traumatic deaths I’m sure for a little girl, but for a viewer who has barely been introduced to most of them, compassion fatigue is likely to set in.
Covering something like 20 years in two hours, “Persepolis” is really more a sketch of Satrapi’s life than an autobiography.    Certain things, like the rapidly changing and deeply complex political climate around her, are noted, but moved past  rather quickly;  a working knowledge of recent Iranian history will be helpful while watching, but is by no means required.   Other things are intentionally jotted in shorthand.   The film functions as vignettes interrupted by montages. The best vignettes are harrowing, funny, moving, and precise. Satrapi expects the viewer to overlay their own experience and emotions over the template she provides, and most of the time, this works just fine.

“Persepolis” is a good movie to watch if, like 99% of America, you need to brush up on your Iranian history and culture.    As the politicians of this country and that seemed determined to keep playing games of nuclear chicken, it might be wise for Joe Voter to know a little bit more about this country and its citizens before we engage in another war of liberation.  But with its distinctive look, unique storytelling style and universal coming of age story, it’s also undeniably a work of art, and worth seeing for that reason.

Recommended

• If you’re curious about Iranian history and culture
• If you’re interested in artistic animation, or something different from Pixar and Dreamworks.
• If you, or anyone you know, has ever been displaced from your home.

Not Recommended

• If you hate subtitles (it’s French)
• if your attention span is feeling short.   This will challenge your patience, at times.
• if you’re not into artsy, quirky, politically engaged, historically educating cinema
• if cartoon characters with dirty mouths will shock and/or offend you, or just seem so comical you can’t take them seriously.