The animated PERSEPOLIS film continues to get great reviews. Stephen Holden in the NY Times:

Because it is animated, “Persepolis” is a bold choice for the festival’s closing-night selection. “A cartoon?” you may sniff. “How dare they?” But the movie is so enthralling that it eroded my longstanding resistance to animation, and I realized that the same history translated into a live-action drama could never be depicted with the clarity and narrative drive that bold, simple animation encourages.


Stephanie Zacharek in Salon:

I fully expected the “Persepolis” books to translate well to the movie screen. And yet the new movie adaptation of “Persepolis” — which closes the New York Film Festival this Sunday and will open elsewhere in December — exceeded my expectations. The animated picture, in French with English subtitles, is a concise condensation of the two books that never feels rushed or unduly truncated. It’s intimate, as a biography ought to be, but co-directors Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud also manage to give it a panoramic scale: While the movie doesn’t attempt to be an Iranian history lesson, it does capture the way people’s lives can be both drastically changed and yet, in some ways, remain defiantly unchanged when their government subverts everything they believe in, using God — or some version of God — as its chief weapon.

1 COMMENT

  1. I caught a screening of Persepolis at the the Toronto film festival last month. Excellent. In fact, better than I was expecting. Such a great style to translate into animated form.

  2. As a fan of the graphic novels, I’m eagerly anticipating the film. But I can’t help but wonder (and worry) about how it will play in the cirrent political climate.

  3. Loved the books, can’t wait to see the film.

    Re: any political viewings. Won’t matter one bit. Current Iranian officials will still hate it and call for it’s disposal. American officials will barely pay attention to it, or those who do (radical Christian right) will make it a calling for Bush being right about wanting to go to war with Iran in order to ‘free’ the people, like they did with Afghanistan and Iraq *sigh*