"Persepolis" is an animated film (in French with subtitles) based on the graphic novels Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi. The movie chronicles Satrapi's childhood and early adulthood, growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution--actually I guess I should say the revolution against the Shah. One of the interesting things I learned about Iran from reading Persepolis is that the revolution did not start as Islamic, and the Islamic fundamentalists didn't take over immediately after the revolution.
The animation style in the movie is quite unique, not resembling anything that I can think of recently. There aren't quite enough frames for the action to be continuous, instead it looked almost like a flip book movie. As it turns out, this style of animation worked quite well with Satrapi's art, and I found the movie quite visually appealing as well as very true to the style of the graphic novels.
Having just read her graphic novels over the summer, it was also quite interesting for me to see the differences between the movie and graphic novel. Naturally, the movie greatly abridges the graphic novel, leaving out whole characters and incidents, but it also expands on certain parts of the graphic novel, giving more detail about what happened. Overall, I thought that the screenplay was excellent. It did a good job of not feeling like an abridgment of a longer work, and captured the essence of the graphic novels.
Now I happen to think that the Persepolis graphic novels fall into the category of good rather than great. As a result, the movie also fell into that category for me. If you loved or hated the graphic novels, I would adjust my grade accordingly.
Final Grade: B
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment