PERSEPOLIS (2007) is an irresistible French film portraying the written autobiography of author Marjane Satrapi (pictured below). Set in the frame of an animated, dark-comedy the audience is made privy to the growing pains and experiences of a feisty, Iranian girl coming of age in the midst of the Iranian Revolution. To me it was vaguely reminiscent of The Dairy of Anne Frank
yet delightfully unique in its own right. Aside from the fluent artistic illustrations you learn a good deal about Iranian culture; meanwhile reminded that even though people differ culturally, fundamentally our needs and desires remain one in the same. Overall, an educational, heartfelt, original, artistic and thought-provoking gem of a film. Awarded: Jury Prize (2007) at Cannes Film Festival
Nominated: Academy Award for Best Animated Feature
Did you ever consider making it as a live action film?
Interview courtesy of Sean Axmaker of www.seanax.com/persepolis
"Not at all because for a subject like that and for the purpose we had, me and Vincent, we wanted the story to be much more universal. I didn’t want it to become a political or
historical or sociological statement, because I’m not a politician and I’m not a historian and I’m not a sociologist. I’m one person and I believe that there is only one thing that is important and that’s the human being, the individual. Individualism is the basis of democracy, without individualism we don’t have any. As soon as you make a movie in a geographical place with some type of human being, then it becomes the story of the Middle-Eastern, far from us: “They’re not us, they’re foreign.” There’s something about the abstraction of the drawing that everybody can relate to because drawing is the first language of the human being, before writing, before even the use of the language. We have so many different kinds of narration in the movie. We have the scenes of normal life, we have the puppet things that are the historical scenes, we have the more realistic scenes, meeting with the guard and all these scenes of the war, etc. The animation became an obvious choice, because otherwise we would have done something vulgar going in the other direction. And that helped a lot."
Get Persepolis and other Discounted Books & DVDs at The Nook!
"Not at all because for a subject like that and for the purpose we had, me and Vincent, we wanted the story to be much more universal. I didn’t want it to become a political or
historical or sociological statement, because I’m not a politician and I’m not a historian and I’m not a sociologist. I’m one person and I believe that there is only one thing that is important and that’s the human being, the individual. Individualism is the basis of democracy, without individualism we don’t have any. As soon as you make a movie in a geographical place with some type of human being, then it becomes the story of the Middle-Eastern, far from us: “They’re not us, they’re foreign.” There’s something about the abstraction of the drawing that everybody can relate to because drawing is the first language of the human being, before writing, before even the use of the language. We have so many different kinds of narration in the movie. We have the scenes of normal life, we have the puppet things that are the historical scenes, we have the more realistic scenes, meeting with the guard and all these scenes of the war, etc. The animation became an obvious choice, because otherwise we would have done something vulgar going in the other direction. And that helped a lot."Get Persepolis and other Discounted Books & DVDs at The Nook!
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