Which is the greater good? To each his/her own, but I'm glad this stop-motion blend of tenderness and cynicism - animated by Starburns Industries - has hit theaters. It has the potential to help shatter nation-wide misconceptions that feature animation should always be at least safe for viewers 12 and under. It's the Bush administration's second term, and Michael Stone (David Thewlis) is a graying customer service expert flying into Cincinnati to promote his new book at a conference. On the phone he is prickly toward his LA-based wife and son, he gives the robotic hotel staff the cold shoulder, and a bar reunion with his ex goes south fast.
Then a blip on Michael's radar named Lisa (voiced with natural playfulness and insecurity by Jennifer Jason Leigh) catches his ear amid the entire male and female supporting cast, all given bland yet witty voice by Tom Noonan. Noonan, Thewlis and Leigh originally portrayed these characters in Kaufman's decade-old sound play, scored live by Carter Burwell (Burwell returns for duty on the film, and his excellent, chamber-size writing is both quirky and melancholy).
To justify the play's transition to animation, all of Tom Noonan's characters share the same generic, 3D-printed facial structure that bores Michael to insanity. Michael and Lisa's faces, meanwhile, are real yet expressive. There is a danger in animation known as the uncanny valley: the farther you stray from exaggerated design, the closer you get to human anatomy, but before you reach that perfect balance of real and expressive, you fall into a pit of cold human replication that so many motion-capture movies do.
But co-director Duke Johnson and the film's rapid prototype team have soared right past the valley and into a realm of subtlety I have never seen achieved in feature animation. Even when a character's walk feel a touch slow, every little raise of an eyebrow and twist of a mouth corner conveys emotion at once both complex and recognizable. There's even a moment where a character's replacement face literally breaks the fourth wall and is sure to please stop-motion aficionados (the crew has left the lines separating the upper and lower face components visible for a reason).
Other aesthetic elements are in place to support the realism: John Joyce's exact production design and Joe Passarelli's warm, mellow cinematography resemble a David Fincher film at first glance. Like Fincher, Kaufman view of the world is a little hopeless. I don't always catch on to the weirder details in Kaufman's writing, but his adherence to three-act structure makes his first endeavor into animation accessible. I think he flubbed the final two minutes, however, which take us out of Michael's point-of-view for the first time and give Lisa a tidier resolution than the story was building toward.
Still, an animated film for adults is rare, and an animated film for adults that doesn't look like any other animated film for adults is rarer still. If you're intrigued, go seek it out!
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