Persepolis Review edited

Persepolis as a movie makes a powerful statement. It is an animated film based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. It starts out in Iran in the pre Revolution days. It chronicles her life as she grows up. This in itself would not be an interesting base for a film, but because Marji is growing up during the Iranian Revolution, everyday actions are transformed into events that can be chronicled. Because of this violent time she is growing up in she is forced to deal with very adult issues, from a child’s perspective. Coming from a graphic novel, it faces certain challenges in setup and delivery. But as such it has certain advantages to other films that could present the same kind of story. The graphic novel itself is completely in black and white, using the hardline contrast to create a view that a child sees, as Marji grows up colors and shades of gray slowly appear. Persepolis excels in several areas because of this. In several parts of the movie it uses the stark black and white of the animation to a cinema graphic peak. Carrie Rickey, The Philadelphia Inquirer Film Critic sums it up with, “The film, mostly black-and-white figures against atmospheric gray and greige grounds that provide texture and depth”. The flashing scenes and the stark contrast is very reminiscent of the novel itself. The Use of the childlike animation to portray the harsh ideas outlined in the novel can really only be accomplished this way. When the movie shows her being assaulted by the older ladies in the full veils, the animation creates a feeling of crows attacking a piece of meat. It changes a verbal assault in to a physical one showing how scared she actually is. But although the animation is very simplistic, the art work is not, it has very beautiful scenes and with eye for detail you can pick up a lot from the images. The simplistic animation I mentioned earlier has one particularly great boon, it gives great freedom to express emotion on the faces of the characters and because it is simple everyone can connect with this emotion. But since it is from a graphic novel, it faces several challenges, the suspense, and feeling created by the graphic novel is lost in this rendition of the story, and being a biography already it loses that suspense without a way of reproducing it, and being a movie it cannot capture the feeling that can be created on a breakout page of the graphic novel. Adversely the movie also succeeds in a realm most American movies cant, the use of the French language and subtitles creates a better feel of the comic book atmosphere that an English film cannot. It allows the viewer to really feel the emotion of the words, because the viewer is reading the words on the screen, and listening to these words in French, the cadence, inflection, and emotion of the scenes really shines through the medium of language. Thus giving you the speed and information of a comic book while retaining the purity of film emotion, I felt despair and hopelessness several times throughout watching the film, when the revolutionaries have arrested Anoosh I could feel the pain through the movie, and when the characters talk about the deaths and the revolution, I felt hopelessness about how we could fix this. The filmmakers and the author really accomplished their purpose in this film, speaking to an audience that didn’t live through the newscasts of the revolution; they speak successfully to a generation, an extremely difficult task I may add. The use of the comic book animation in the film is definitely targeted toward this generation. All and the film is very representative of the novel itself, with an appropriate number of omissions and changes that are expected in the conversion of a novel to a film. An example of such is that Film starts out with the adult Marijane in the airport while the novel starts right into the story. Although these omissions are necessary I would defiantly like to see more of the story instead of the 98 minute limits of the film. All in all Persepolis was an excellent film and has my approval and blessing.