Michel Gondry, even at his worst, is a visually inventive film maker who can create memorable images from something as middle of the road as The Green Hornet. Animation plays a big part in The Science of Sleep and Mood Indigo, so for him to do a fully animated film was an enticing prospect. His choice of subject, however, is a strange one. Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? is a serie
s of interviews with Noam Chomsky by the distinctive French director, animated, apparently, using felt pens and acetate.
Chomsky is a popular liberal thinker and linguist whose work, for some reason, I hadn’t really encountered before, so I was approaching this as a Gondry and animation fan, rather than a Chomsky acolyte. Thankfully, the polymath is an engaging, worryingly intelligent subject, here discussing the development of language in childhood and how we come to understand signs and signifiers. More charming than the interviewee, however, is the interviewer; Gondry is marvellously self-deprecating, openly confessing when he doesn’t understand what is happening, or when he got tired of animating a particularly long sequence. His questions are thoughtful, his responses funny and he makes an excellent foil to the rather serious Chomsky. Together the two of them make an electric double act as ideas are thrown around and the audience are left feeling a little bit stupid.
At the beginning of the film, Gondry explains why he is animating it. All film – documentary included – is a form of manipulation where the director or editor controls how the audience receives the information. Gondry’s conclusion, therefore, is that animation is a permanent reminder that you are watching artifice, that the version of Chomsky we are seeing is one that is undoubtedly being presented to us via someone else (something that is reinforced by the repeated whirring of an old camera). Gondry then releases the viewer to engage with all the ideas without restraint. The animation is lo-fi but captures the energy of the discussion perfectly, often repeating movements and images to suggest the circularity of the language, and using crude drawings of the two talkers to depict the mood of the conversation; it’s not always gentle discourse. What really works is that the often difficult intellectual ideas to get your head around are given perfect clarity by Gondry’s perfectly judged visualisations of these big themes. The director’s humour seeps into his drawings, too, making this a surprisingly light and accessible film that can be enjoyed even by those who dread discussions about knowledge endowment and its expression through language.
Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy is playing at Edinburgh International Film Festival on the 20th and 27th June
Animation Confabulation 