Animated films can easily make the audience notice its formal characteristics. Many times, people feel that this form has a lingering feeling of cuteness, but this "Abnormal" is clumsy. Park's stop-motion puppet animation tells a sad and desperate story. This story about the crisis of middle age, the collapse of the spiritual world, and the contrast between the animation form, has formed an unspeakable strength.
Its story is very simple. The middle-aged best-selling author Michael Stone went on a business trip to give a speech, and met a girl Lisa in the hotel, and fell into an extramarital affair. In the end, he left that girl and returned to a boring life. . But this monotonous story is full of interesting metaphors.
First of all, almost all characters in this animation are dubbed male voices, from the protagonist to the waiter, and even the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend, wife, and son. For ordinary audiences, this is confusing, but this is the result of the director's deliberate actions. Because in Michael Stone's mind, the world is barren, and in his eyes, there is no difference between everyone. It is indeed wonderful to present this deep loneliness with the same voice. But only the girl he met Lisa had a female voice, which meant that this woman was so different to him, she was very different from the whole world. The whole world is so boring and pale, and this woman is unique. This mental state of the hero is directly related to the second metaphor.
The name of the hotel where the protagonist lives is fregoli. The original meaning of this word is Fregeli delusional syndrome. This type of patient believes that all persons are actually the same person in disguise, which is a kind of delusional cognitive syndrome. In the eyes of patients with this disease, those people may be the incarnation of a certain persecutor. This interesting detail alludes to the mental state of the male protagonist, and is intertextually and mutually corroborating with the previous "sound metaphor".
Third, about Lisa. The girl who met, chatted with Michael Stone on the bed, and talked about a word anomaly, which means "abnormal" and "abnormal", which Lisa learned from his book. In the eyes of this uneducated girl, this term is very compelling, and she feels that it also happens to describe her state of being alienated from many people. The actor said in her ear, "anomalisa, pronounced like a romantic European language. The girl fell in love with this name in an instant. She felt it was like "abnormal" mixed with her own name, and this word is exactly this. The name of the movie. More importantly, it also alludes to the abnormal and chaotic spiritual world of the hero.
A more interesting point appeared at the end. The actor wanted to buy toys for his younger son as a gift, but drunk accidentally broke into an adult pillowside toy store, and accidentally saw a winding Japanese antique decorative doll. He took it home and gave it to his son. The son fiddled with disgust, and the wife suddenly said, "What is going out like semen." This sentence broke a very scary detail-whether Lisa really existed, and what was that one-night stand. It's not the hero's fantasy. If this is the case, then this already extremely chaotic and abnormal world shook more violently, because the boundary between reality and fiction has been broken. In the chaotic brain of the hero, the truth and falsehood of this world has become Suspicious, or irrelevant. So in all the previous stories, which ones actually happened, and which ones were his own illusions?
Dissociation, abnormality, anxiety and boredom are the core of this film, and this is also the common symptom of contemporary urban diseases. Michael Stone has become a mirror image of each of us. He is trapped in emotion, escaping from emotion, and chasing the state of emotion. Who can say that it is not the appearance of each of us?
This man has experienced the same escape twice, once 11 years ago, he swears to his girlfriend each other a minute ago, and escaped without a trace the next day, so that 11 years later, the woman still can't let go; the second time, It was with Lisa, who took the initiative to talk about spending the rest of his life with her, but left without looking back the next day. He could not explain this behavior himself. But this in itself has undoubtedly revealed his fear of intimacy. In fact, he wanted to keep his emotions at the most intense peak, and so far, he couldn't accept the intimacy and boredom caused by staying together. Therefore, his current family is like a disaster to him. But at the same time, he couldn't accept loneliness. He was trapped in the gap.
Michael Stone's movements are always slack, an extremely tired and desperate look, shaking his arms, dragging his legs, talking time mixed with fuck and shit, smoking one by one. As a writer of "Self-Help Success Learning" books, on the cover of the book, he smiled confidently. In the book, he provides perfect solutions for companies, but in reality, he can't even explain his own life.
The form of cartoons creates a more isolated perspective, allowing people to examine every detail, and sometimes, it makes us feel that this is an examination of our own lives. This animated feature film has won multiple nominations such as Golden Lion, Golden Globe, Oscar, etc. It is a mixture of magic and dreams, but turned around and gave a sharp knife to reality.
The last scene was very meaningful. Her wife turned around and friends enjoyed themselves. Only the male protagonist was lonely listening to her singing to the mechanically constructed Japanese doll. This is his fate. With a virtual, projected "thing" instead of a "person", accompany each other, or stand alone.
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