Animating animation?

Is it a problem if a film, which is about terror and persecution and alienation, is also visually entrancing? When you sit there semi-glued, thinking that almost any scene would look good and/or striking, as a greeting card? I went to see the film Persepolis with my niece Grace. It is the story of a young Iranian girl who grows up in the time of the Shah in Tehran to left wing parents who live with some fear of persecution; relatives are in jail and have been tortured. The main character, Marjane, is bolshie and vulnerable when the revolution comes because of her outspokenness. As a teenager, she is sent to Vienna to school and thus begins a complex time in her life.

Like any outsider, she finds it hard to make friends and this is complicated by the fact that she finds it hard to organise a sympathetic place to live. One review I read said that the writer, Marjane Satrapi, is setting up Europe as hospitable on the surface but, in contrast with Iranians, there is no real sense of community and when the chips are down… Well home is better, whatever the politics. This sentiment is sort of belied by the ending and my sense that the dichotomy is false. An outsider in any society can have a pretty alienating time. And Marjane has an extreme reaction to some of the events, which take place in Europe.

The film provides a brief political history of the last 30 years in Iran, with a particular focus on what happens to women. It is great – really accessible, especially for my 15-year-old niece who is pretty savvy. But you don’t need to be really savvy to get it.

What I struggled with ultimately was the form of the film. It’s animated. It’s incredibly stylish to look at in its black and white simple 60’s style drawings. We see the white jasmine from the bra of Marjane’s wise old grannie tumble out of her clothes as she undresses. The flowers float across the screen like something out of a 60's film in a San Francisco park. A jail appears like the haunted house on the hill. Marjane’s unfaithful Austrian lover morphs from a handsome (in a polo-necked tosser-ish sort of way) to a snaggle-toothed user as she comes to see him more clearly. Lines on lines of men march in protest against the Shah, then we see one mown down by rifle fire. He crumples gracefully and we know that the seeping black is blood but it lacks the emotional impact, which we should feel when we see people being blasted away. Or is this too ubiquitous an image now? I went to see the film Battle for Haditha at the film festival. In this film, many civilians are killed by soldier’s rifle fire as they are in Persepolis. Like the latter film, its based on real events but one is chilling in the extreme and one is not. I think the animation serves to distance us from the events and feelings on screen. I can’t quite rid myself of the sense that this is, after all, a cartoon. Perhaps this is generational but when I asked Grace about it, I think she felt the same way. One of her loves is the films of filmmaker Hiyeo Miyazake – I really like his work as well. But his subject matter is much more playful and suitable for the animation genre. I feel like an old person as I write this. I like The Simpsons; it’s a clever piece of work but I don’t watch it addictively. Something in me finds the genre wanting.

I really enjoyed the film. It’s told from the heart and we are with Marjane every step of the way. I’ve just had to work a bit harder and more consciously to feel the intensity of the events that the director is interested in.