- The animation was fanfreakingtastic. The drawing style itself was super appealing and they were able to make it wonderfully flexible to adapt to so many parts of the story without disrupting the visual cohesion. Like in most other movies, anything taking place within the current timeline actually has colour in it and naturally everything fades to black and white as the story is told as an autobiography. When there are flashbacks within the flashbacks, they further differentiate the style by making it rather flat and child-like, which works with the reduction of those flashbacks to something that she remembers or something that was told to her in a very concrete, biased way. The scene where her uncle regales her with tales of how the British put the Shah in power was particularly fantastic for this flashback within a flash back scene.
- This movie has a great balance of humour and tragedy. Everything that was hysterical to the point of tears would be followed by something that was equally tragic to the point of tears.
- There’s a point in the movie at which Marji is exiled by her parents to a French school in Vienna where she overhears classmates discussing the war in Iran and describing Iranians basically as backwards savages, and I think the movie as a whole, not just in this scene, does a great job of putting a human face on a nation of people who are probably largely misunderstood in the western hemisphere. Most of the movies coming out lately that deal with any kind of strife in the Middle East have started including some sort of “Wait, they’re not all evil terrorists? SHOCK AND AWE” type opinions, but this is the only movie I’ve seen where it actually works and works really well.
- There’s just so much more that is great about this movie but I was too tired to write about it last night and now I’ve completely lost everything I wanted to talk about.
Persepolis
This movie is grrrrrRRRRRRRRRRREAT, like Tony the Tiger.
IMDB Plot Synopsis Poignant coming-of-age story of a precocious and outspoken young Iranian girl that begins during the Islamic Revolution.