The Academy Award nominated animated film, Anomalisa, hits select theaters this week.  The directors discussed the process behind making one of the most unique movies of the year.

Anomalisa tells the story of husband, father and well-known author, Michael Stone (David Thewlis), who finds his life to be unbearably mundane. When he takes a business trip to Cincinnati, he meets Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who may or may not be the love of his life.

Even though the movie features stop-motion puppets, the story is told in a tender and humorous dreamscape that makes for an adult and thought-provoking experience.  

The stop-motion film was written by Charlie Kaufman, who also directed alongside Duke Johnson. Kaufman has been nominated for three Academy Awards for his screenplays and won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar in 2005 for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Johnson is more known for his animated shorts and television specials (Community’s “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas”), and Anomalisa is his first feature length film. 

Anomalisa actually began as a “sound play” written in 2005 by Kaufman and writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen. Kaufman said that the story did not change in the decade since the play debuted, but that Johnson and a group of animators approached him in 2012 asking if they wanted to collaborate together to turn the non-visual script into an animated movie.

Johnson said that he was looking to find more adult and authentic stories and that Kaufman’s script seemed perfect for him to work on.

“I was excited at the prospect of the script existing. I was a big fan of Charlie’s, then I read the script and I loved it,” Johnson said. “There are things about the script that I thought was perfect for stop motion. Just the fact that it hadn’t been visualized before, it could be anything.”

Visualizing a non-visual script proved to be challenging, especially for Kaufman who had never worked on an animated film before. He said that even though it was a difficult and long process, he loved learning about this style of filmmaking.

“I loved what it looked like. When we started seeing the results, I felt very pleased and proud of this,” Kaufman said.

Even though it might be assumed that Johnson was the mastermind behind the stop-motion, the two insist that the effort was collaborative. The co-directors said they shared a similar sensibility and aesthetic, and that the final result can be seen as their “mutant offspring” of their talents.

With the unique stop-motion and human story, Kaufman and Johnson hope audiences become engaged with the world they created and have a personal experience with the movie.

“I hope that they are able to connect with it in some way in whatever way that they do. I hope they have some sort of emotional experience, but it is up to their own interpretation what their specific experience is,” Johnson said.

Anomalisa is now playing in select theaters and is rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity and language.