Anomalisa at 10: Charlie Kaufman's darkest movie relaunched his career

A decade after its release, the animated Anomalisa is a fascinating inflection point in a brilliant filmmaker's career.

In the season 5 episode “Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples,” Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) hires her community college classmate Abed (Danny Pudi) to make a viral YouTube video about Jesus, but the simple project soon evolves into a tortured meta commentary on the act of filmmaking itself.

“In the filmmaker's film, Jesus is a filmmaker trying to find God with his camera,” Abed explains. “But then the filmmaker realizes that he's actually Jesus and he's being filmed by God's camera, and it goes like that forever in both directions like a mirror in a mirror, because all of the filmmakers are Jesus and all of their cameras are God.”

Shirley replies bluntly: “Come on, Charlie Kaufman, some of us have work in the morning, damn!”

Kaufman’s name is a clever shortcut for heady, self-referential filmmaking (his films at the time included Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malovitch), but it was also clearly done out of love. Because just a few years later, Harmon lifted Kaufman out of his slump with a new film that would prove to be his most simple and powerful yet: Anomalisa.

Anomalisa was produced by Harmon’s Starburn Industries and released by Paramount on Dec. 30, 2015, but it started out as a play. The story follows Michael Stone (David Thewlis), a middle-aged family man on a business trip to Cincinnati. Michael suffers from the Fregoli delusion, a rare condition where the subject becomes convinced everyone else around them is actually one person wearing various disguises. The Fregoli delusion is often associated with paranoia, but for Michael, it reflects his apathy on life. He drifts through a world without meaning, and the fact that every man, woman, and child has the same face and speaks in the same voice (Tom Noonan) emphasizes how dull that world has become.

This changes when Michael meets Lisa, an unassuming woman who stands out because she has a unique face and voice (Jennifer Jason Leigh). That night in his hotel room, they get to know each other and eventually have sex, leading to a twist you’ll probably see coming, but I won’t spoil here in case you don’t.

As a “sound play” with the same actors performing their parts with scripts in hand in front of a live audience, Anomalisa drew humor out of the disconnect between the poignant plot and the reality of those performances. Noonan speaking every other line, for example, is funnier when you can see his actual face, while the hauntingly beautiful sex scene between Michael and Lisa hits different with Thewlis and Leigh grunting and groaning while seated several feet apart from each other onstage. In a 2015 interview with Den of Geek, Harmon called Kaufman’s play “the best thing I’d ever seen written in any written medium, period.”

Adapting that experience to film was a challenge, and one Kaufman initially bristled at. Eventually, he was won over by the idea of reimagining Anomalisa as stop-motion animation featuring lifelike puppets. For the filmmaker, the artform only reinforced the meta-narrative concepts at the heart of all his work.

“The fact that they’re puppets being manipulated becomes an existential issue as well,” Kaufman told The Guardian. “You know someone’s manipulating them — they don’t know it.”

(To lovingly quote a great sitcom, again: “Come on, Charlie Kaufman, some of us have work in the morning, damn!”)

Anomalisa earned rave reviews but barely made a profit on its reported $6 million budget — in the grand scheme of hits like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, and even the cult hit Synecdoche, New York, the movie is rarely discussed or remembered outside the few who showed up for it the first time. Kaufman eventually returned to live-action filmmaking with 2020’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things. As a Netflix original, we have no idea how much it cost or how many people watched it, but I hope Kaufman got a nice paycheck after the painstaking labor of adapting his work to stop-motion.

Back in 2015, however, Kaufman was clearly still struggling to process the response to Synechdoche, New York.

“It would have been better if it had been a commercial success, because it would have made my professional life afterward easier,” he told The Guardian. “I’ve been writing and struggling to get stuff made since then. It’s not like I’m just sitting here, but it’s been hard.”

Hopefully, things have gotten a bit easier in the decade since. As the brilliant mind behind some of the most interesting movies of the 21st century, we need more, not less, from Charlie Kaufman — even if some of his most interesting work came out of a period when he was forced to work with the fewest resources possible.