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Clarence Tsui

Persepolis
The voices of:  Chiara Mastroianni,  Catherine Deneuve,  Danielle Darrieux,  Simon Abkarian
Directors: Marjane Satrapi  and Vincent Paronnaud
The film: Years from now, film historians will see Persepolis as one of the key  movies which helped change how animation films are seen and produced. Not that the film showcases the major technological  breakthroughs that DreamWorks' Jeffrey Katzenberg  and his counterparts have been obsessed with delivering for years; Persepolis has stayed close to its origins, driven by the hand-drawn, no-frills, two-dimensional drawings of Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical graphic novel.
What makes this film - the winner of the Jury Prize  at last year's Cannes Film Festival, and  co-directed by Satrapi  and comic artist Vincent Paronnaud (aka Winschluss)  - a revelation is how it proves that  far from being mere computer-generated visual gimmickry, animation films  can  stir emotions, address  social issues and provoke political debate as well as  entertain.
Well before adapting her books to the screen, Satrapi's story  had entranced many.
It  begins with the way she and her friends lived their teenage lives under  Iran's strict Islamic regime and also survived the daily bombardment of Iraqi bombs, through to her troubled exile as a young student in Austria  before a confused return home to a  war-torn country and a misguided marriage.
The idiosyncratic visual style that drives the four-volume Persepolis books - ink drawings that mix contemporary comics with splatterings of Iranian folk art -  could  have been hard to reproduce on film. What Satrapi and Paronnaud  didn't do was reproduction: they used the freedom of their medium to create grand sequences depicting war and alienation.  Satrapi's life story is sadly dominated by both and also  music -  an off-key rendition of Eye of the Tiger  from the teenage Marjane, voiced by Chiara Mastroianni, is one of the many moving moments in  the film.
What's most important, however, is how Satrapi and Paronnaud prove that animation is just as powerful in telling stories as live-action films - sometimes even more so, as the interplay of the linear narrative and fantasy sequences  can run alongside each other without demanding that audiences adjust their perception.  Without Persepolis, there would certainly not be the interest like that shown towards films such as Ari Folman's  Waltz with Bashir  at Cannes this year. That animated documentary  examines the roles played by Israeli soldiers as Palestinians were massacred by Christian militia at two refugee camps in Beirut in 1982.
The extras: The film  can be seen either with the original French voice cast or with an American version (with Mastroianni and Catherine Deneuve, who plays Marjane's mother in both, joined by  Sean Penn,  Gena Rowlands and  Iggy Pop). There are two featurettes - a half-hour documentary presenting the directors and their animators at work, and a much shorter and banal one (produced around the American cast) with talking heads.
The most interesting bonus feature, however, is the section in which the evolution of three particular scenes is shown with commentary from Satrapi - the most vivid being her explanations about how her suicide attempt was drawn but eventually dropped from the film.
The verdict: A compelling and emotionally charged vehicle  full of humanity and humour, Persepolis is one of the best films  of the past year.



Persepolis