‘Anomalisa’ Directors Charlie Kaufman & Duke Johnson Interview

Selling Animation for Adults, Avoiding the Uncanny Valley in Animation

Was there ever any concern about this not being an animated story for children?

Kaufman: We were excited about that! That’s what interested us, we wanted to do something that used this form, but used it in a different way. For adults. And not in a kind of – [makes a Disney kind of gesture] – but you know, this big, silly thing! Nuanced, movements, with emotional impact. I never, personally, shy away from that kind of thing. It’s more like “ok, well how do we do this?”

Johnson: People have worked in animation, my colleagues, peers, we’re all aware of the world of animation outside of America. Where there’s all kinds of animations used for all kinds of stories, of course animators like Jan Švankmajer, and all tons of stuff in Asia, even some Miyazaki stuff, it’s just used to tell all different kinds of stories, but in America it’s just delegated to, y’know, kids movies, which is-

Kaufman: — It’s for kids!

Johnson: It’s frustrating! Y’know, It’s for kids!!

Do you think it’s because they’re concerned about how to sell it?

Kaufman: Everything is about that.

Johnson: Exactly, that’s why there’s Marvel superhero movies.

Kaufman: Which by the way are not for kids, for some strange reason… but big kids.

Evan via TheYoungFolks: If I can ask about the style of the puppets, the process of the production, the puppets themselves, the lighting and the sets have this kind of look to it, some may find it to be in the uncanny valley. But, it’s photorealistic, and it’s clearly a deliberate decision… can you tell how that style came about?

Johnson: I would say we feel it doesn’t have an uncanny valley aesthetic. I think that we talked about uncanny valley a lot early on, which refers to a term that originated in, I believe, Japanese robotics, where, as something gets very close to looking human, it’s good until it reaches a point where it falls off a cliff and it feels very—

Kaufman: Creepy.

Johnson: Creepy, and people are sort of appalled by it. I think you see that a lot in computer generated things, motion capture, because, you know, there’s a soullessness in the eyes, and there’s a dead quality. I’ll tell you about how that affected our design, but also just jumping ahead to our experience in traveling the world, and seeing audiences responding to that, I don’t feel that is an accurate way to describe the design because many people have said that there are times in the movie that they forget they’re watching puppets…

Kaufman: Or that this moment is more “true” than anything they’ve seen with live actors, a lot specifically about the sex scene, but about other moments as well.

Johnson: We did things like trying to animate the breathing, like that, to make them feel alive, normally in the animation that I’ve done you try to cut out the breaths and clean up the audio, but we labored a lot of extra work to have them constantly breathing, but the big thing we did was mainly focus on the eyes as much as possible, to make them look wet, to make them look very manipulatable and constantly moving as human eyes do, and also having eye lights. We planted little “grains of wheat” which are little tiny light bulbs, in all the sets, so anywhere the puppets looked they would have eye lights, and would feel alive.