Persepolis
Jan. 14th, 2008 02:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidWarning: possible spoilers.
Yesterday I went to see the movie version of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis. It's the story of her childhood in and out of Iran, as the Shah was deposed and Muslim right-wing groups came to power. I loved the book, and had high hopes for the movie.
Amazingly (for me, anyway), the movie lived up to my expectations. Surpassed them, actually. Usually I have a hard time with movie versions of books, but this was wonderful. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I already knew what the visual style would be, how people would look, and so on, so there wasn't any dissonance between how I think $Character should be, and how the director/actor chose to portray $Character. And because a graphic novel carries a lot of its information visually already, so the translation to film is more about adding motion to extant visuals than about subtracting plot. In this case, anyway, since it was going from a black and white graphic novel to a mostly black and white animated movie (there was some color, used for emphasis at times, but it wasn't frequent).
The plot is pretty much the same as the book, though I think there was a bit more backstory about the situation in Iran than the book had. Or perhaps it was condensed into one chunk, instead of being given in pieces; I'm not sure. It left me feeling that I had a better idea of the flow of events, and how close the might-have-been of another government in the Middle East not run along religious lines.
The animation is great. The style followed Satrapi's drawings, and the artists who made them move and gave them sound are impressive, things like the backstory bits having the feel of a cardboard puppet show, or the American political figure speaking French with a horribly American accent (It's a dubbed movie; I was surprised by how much of the French I was able to catch, though I definitely needed the subtitles.), or including lots of little details like an inchworm in a garden. Just stunning. (Some scenes made me think of Jan Pienkowski's silhouette pictures for Joan Aiken's A Necklace of Raindrops, which I have adored since I was small. And going to find his name shows that there's a new edition of that book out with someone else's illustrations! That's just wrong.)
edit How could I forget the animation-ized bit of Godzilla?/edit
I was pleased that the 3:40 showing at the Kendall yesterday was so full; I hope it does well enough in its limited release to get to more theaters. Two thumbs up.
Yesterday I went to see the movie version of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Persepolis. It's the story of her childhood in and out of Iran, as the Shah was deposed and Muslim right-wing groups came to power. I loved the book, and had high hopes for the movie.
Amazingly (for me, anyway), the movie lived up to my expectations. Surpassed them, actually. Usually I have a hard time with movie versions of books, but this was wonderful. I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I already knew what the visual style would be, how people would look, and so on, so there wasn't any dissonance between how I think $Character should be, and how the director/actor chose to portray $Character. And because a graphic novel carries a lot of its information visually already, so the translation to film is more about adding motion to extant visuals than about subtracting plot. In this case, anyway, since it was going from a black and white graphic novel to a mostly black and white animated movie (there was some color, used for emphasis at times, but it wasn't frequent).
The plot is pretty much the same as the book, though I think there was a bit more backstory about the situation in Iran than the book had. Or perhaps it was condensed into one chunk, instead of being given in pieces; I'm not sure. It left me feeling that I had a better idea of the flow of events, and how close the might-have-been of another government in the Middle East not run along religious lines.
The animation is great. The style followed Satrapi's drawings, and the artists who made them move and gave them sound are impressive, things like the backstory bits having the feel of a cardboard puppet show, or the American political figure speaking French with a horribly American accent (It's a dubbed movie; I was surprised by how much of the French I was able to catch, though I definitely needed the subtitles.), or including lots of little details like an inchworm in a garden. Just stunning. (Some scenes made me think of Jan Pienkowski's silhouette pictures for Joan Aiken's A Necklace of Raindrops, which I have adored since I was small. And going to find his name shows that there's a new edition of that book out with someone else's illustrations! That's just wrong.)
edit How could I forget the animation-ized bit of Godzilla?/edit
I was pleased that the 3:40 showing at the Kendall yesterday was so full; I hope it does well enough in its limited release to get to more theaters. Two thumbs up.