On Movies: Charlie Kaufman's world through "Anomalisa" puppets' eyes

Charlie Kaufman never planned on

Anomalisa

's becoming a movie.

Written as "a sound play," he says, "basically a staged radio play" and presented at a UCLA theater over three nights in September 2005, the one-act meditation on loneliness, longing, and the mundanity of life starred David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tom Noonan. Well, "starred" is not exactly the right word: The three actors stood on the stage, scripts in hand, no costumes, no sets, while a Foley artist oversaw audio effects, and composer Carter Burwell conducted a musical ensemble.

"The way it was designed, and the reason I wrote it this way, was because the visuals were supposed to be invented in the minds of the audience members," Kaufman said. "There were things in the script that were intentionally ambiguous that would allow different people, I hoped, to have different ideas of what was happening, of how things should appear."

One of the characters had a physical aberration, for instance, but what that was, exactly, is never explained. And the voices of every character in the play - save two - emanated from Noonan.

"I wanted people to think, What would the world look like where everybody sounded the same? What would that look like to different people? . . . I wanted there to be a disconnect between what you're watching on stage and what you're hearing."

That disconnect is gone in the film adaptation of Kaufman's theater piece, to be replaced by other disconnects, like the existential disconnect between one person and another, and the desperate ways people try to, well, fix that, to connect.

Codirected by Kaufman and Duke Johnson, Anomalisa, which opened Friday at the Ritz East, is in many ways what you'd expect from Kaufman. The writer of Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Adaptation is unafraid to explore human obsessions and personal dread, to dive into the dreamlike, the surreal, the psychological.

Well, maybe unafraid is the wrong word, too. Part of what drives Kaufman is fear - a fear of what life is about, a fear of death, abandonment, isolation.

But in one significant way, Anomalisa - a title that fuses the word anomaly with Leigh's character's name - is not what you'd expect from Kaufman at all. The film was made in the painstaking process of stop-motion animation, just like Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox and Nick Park's Wallace and Gromit toons.

The puppets, sized to one-sixth scale, look eerily human. Michael, a customer-service guru (voiced by Thewlis), has the paunch of a middle-age man and the worried mien that comes from too much regret, too much anxiety, too many hopes slipped away. Lisa, the perky customer-service worker he meets in a Cincinnati hotel bar, is similarly realistic in design - the expressiveness in her face, her eyes, is uncanny. The puppets move down scale-model hallways, take scale-model elevators, have sex in a scale-model hotel bed. Even a clip from an old movie (My Man Godfrey, with William Powell), flickering on the TV in Michael's room, was fabricated by Johnson and his crew using miniature props and puppets, a brilliantly exact re-creation of a scene from the original screwball romance.

Anomalisa, which won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival, is nominated for a Golden Globe in the best animated feature category. (The winner will be announced Sunday night during the live shebang.)

"I think this movie kind of almost accidentally and surreptitiously came into being," Kaufman said, seated alongside codirector Johnson in October, when Anomalisa opened the Philadelphia Film Festival. (And where the filmmakers won another award.)

It was a friend of Kaufman's who had been in the audience for the stage play and asked for a copy of the script who came up with the idea of transforming Anomalisa into an animated affair. A meeting with Johnson, who was working for a new animation company, Starburns Industries, was set. Both men, it turned out, had attended NYU - albeit separated by about 20 years. (Kaufman is 57, Johnson 36.) They hit it off.

In July 2012, after shooting a video pitch, Johnson and Starburns launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for the project - at the time, proposed as a 40-minute short. They set a goal of $200,000. At deadline time, they had raised $406,237.

"We told Charlie we were going to do a Kickstarter," Johnson recalled. "He saw the video before we launched it, but he didn't really know that much about what Kickstarter was, and neither did we, really. The producer and I, we printed out 20,000 postcards, and we headed down to Comic Con to hand out postcards to get people to know about our Kickstarter.

"The Kickstarter launched while we were in the car on the way to Comic Con, and, all of a sudden, we're getting notifications like the Wall Street Journal wants to talk to us, and all these people are tweeting, and it's like, 'Charlie Kaufman bla bla bla' - it just kind of blew up. And then I'm in a hotel room at Comic Con and talking to Charlie on the phone. It was Day 2, and we had already raised 30 percent of the money. . . .

"And when we topped $400,000, that was, at the time, the highest-grossing film campaign on Kickstarter. The record was broken pretty quickly, though - the Veronica Mars movie, which raised millions" ($5.7 million to be exact).

Three years and another non-Kickstarter $7 million later, Anomalisa hit the festivals at Telluride and Venice. Paramount acquired the distribution rights in September at the Toronto International Film Festival. Johnson and Kaufman's movie opened in New York and Los Angeles at the end of December, to qualify for Academy Award consideration. It's not a long shot to contemplate a repeat of the Golden Globe nominations - for best animated feature - when the Oscar contenders are announced Thursday.

"I think it could be considered for other Oscars, as well," Johnson said. "I don't know, maybe even best picture? . . . I mean, you can tell me if this is a bad thing to talk about" - he looked over at Kaufman - "but it feels a little odd with the other animated films. Like, how do you compare this with a movie that's made for children? . . . I think that would be a huge challenge for an Academy voter to have Anomalisa in the same category as, say, Inside Out."

"It just happens to be animated," Kaufman added. "But our intention was to make it real - the emotional aspect of this story is real. . . . This is what the world looks like."

It's certainly what Kaufman's world looks like. Here's to it.

srea@phillynews.com

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@Steven_Rea