Just what we’ve all been waiting for: the animated version of Persepolis is being screened at Cannes this week, and that means it should get a general release later this year. There are some great trailers on Satrapi’s MySpace page that include some pretty sweet air guitar and “Eye of the Tiger” renderings by the protagonist. As we mentioned in our Chicken with Plums review, there was a great article on Satrapi in the Independent last year, and more recently, a really good article about Satrapi in the NYT in January (behind the great wall, unfortunately), that has a lot of details about the production, including this bit:
The voices were recorded before the animators began work, with Ms. Satrapi coaching the actors one on one. (Aghast at the prospect of bossing Ms. Deneuve around, she said, she downed three cognacs before directing the actress, who turned out to be ”funny and intelligent and a big smoker.”) Ms. Satrapi allowed herself to be recorded while acting out the physical gestures for each scene, to give the animation team a physical reference.”We could do any number of movements to coordinate with the words,” said Christian Desmares, the chief animator, ”but Marjane wanted to really personalize each character, to use precise Iranian gestures. And we don’t know how to do that.”
Ms. Satrapi interjected: ”I play all the roles. Even the dog.”
The stills from the movie posted to the official website suggest an interesting mix of styles, with the characters drawn faithfully in the mold of the original comics, and the settings and backgrounds done in a more ‘realistic’ mode, perhaps to give the action some dimensionality to move around in. The look it produces seems almost like a visual joke about bringing cartoons into live action films (à la Spiderman, etc.).
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