Failed Oscar Campaigns: "Anomalisa" (2015)

 

Scene from Anomalisa

As awards seasons pick up, so do the campaigns to make your film have the best chances at the Best Picture race. However, like a drunken stupor, sometimes these efforts come off as trying too hard and leave behind a trailer of ridiculous flamboyance. Join me on every other Saturday for a highlight of the failed campaigns that make this season as much about prestige as it does about train wrecks. Come for the Harvey Weinstein comments and stay for the history. It's going to be a fun time as I explore cinema's rich history of attempting to matter.

Anomalisa (2015)

Directed By: Duke Johnson, Charlie Kaufman

Written By: Charlie Kaufman

Starring: David Thewlis, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tom Noonan
Genre: Animation, Comedy, Drama

Running Time: 90 minutes

Summary: A man crippled by the mundanity of his life experiences something out of the ordinary.

- The Movie -

Every few years, a new Charlie Kaufman movie comes out and the discourse around him emerges. The man known for his neurotic dramas that find the human in sci-fi and fantasy premises (which even then is used liberally) reminds us that we're flawed and human. Everyone looks back on his handful of screenplays that have evolved, desiring multiple viewings and personal growth to better understand how can someone of his ilk possibly provides such clever and interesting takes each time out? He pushes the screenplay into existential debates for the ages, demanding that audiences bring a sense of maturity to his work that may sometimes be divisive, but is never dull or unoriginal. The conventional Kaufman movie has more going on in one scene than most mainstream movies have in a whole feature.

Which makes I'm Thinking of Ending Things an interesting revelation. With his first Netflix movie, he has managed to find a premise that is so headache-inducing that it's being considered one of his least accessible features. Starting with a 20-minute car ride, it never quite shows all of its cards, more alluding to what he has to say. As fun as this is, it's the perfect reflection of Kaufman as an auteur, demanding more of an audience that even straightforward advertising feels somewhat facetious. Then again, there's a good chance that you're not watching this unless you know what to expect from Kaufman already.

He's had a career spanning over 20 years at this point, having won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and another two nominations for Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. It's likely that even by Academy Awards standards, he's one of the most buzzed-about writers in the game. You can't help but expect his name to come up in every season that he participates in. It's why Netflix likely wanted to work with him, and why it's interesting to focus on the one Oscar nomination that he got that wasn't for writing.

Following Synecdoche New York, he decided to take on one of the oddest projects in a career full of unexpected turns. Considering how challenging and difficult it was for even loyal fans to appreciate his 2008 feature, it was interesting to see him tackle animation with Anomalisa. Only this wasn't going to be his take on Disney. He wasn't going to soften the edges. Instead, he was going to make an independent drama hidden inside the fantastical, making audiences see something within the style that has been described as more human than human. With a bunch of crew members that collectively redefined TV comedy with [adult swim] shows, it was a film like no other, and one that remains a high point in a career full of odd peaks. 

- The Campaign -

The story begins in 2005 with Kaufman doing a reading of the original script with Jennifer Jason Leigh and David Thewlis. While it's been described as virtually the same to the later film, the 40-minute story was a chance for him to play with a new perspective. Things like the sex scene were comical in person, having actors moan from opposite ends of a table. However, the audio drama version made those details lost in translation. Still, he became interested in adapting into a short film and began to look for collaborators to help him achieve that dream. He eventually landed on the idea of working with Duke Johnson, who by the time of production has a member of Starburns Industries. 

An important thing to know about Starburns Industries is that they were not a movie studio. Johnson, along with co-producers including Dan Harmon and Dino Stamatopoulos, had collectively been at the top of their game on TV. Harmon had created the popular NBC series Community while Johnson had made [adult swim] shows like Mary Shelley's Frankenhole and Moral Orel. One of the prospects of the studio was to be a safe haven for creators who wanted to work in animation, notably in mixing 3D, CGI, and stop motion animation. Not unlike Laika Studios, they were wanting to take things into a more perverse direction. When Kaufman decided to make his film animated, he chose to collaborate with them to give the film a unique feel.

As the interviews for the films will suggest, Anomalisa was a film that only could work in animation. While they're not photorealistic puppets, they are realistic enough that you're drawn to their small flaws, eager to figure out why this is so real. They were anatomically correct. It was reported that a foreplay scene took six months to film while other times found animators yelling at the puppets. There were pictures of the various models and faceplates, highlighting the effort that went into making it unique. Given that there would be sex scenes that, unlike Team America, weren't comical, it was being discussed for its mature look at these characters. With exception to the singular leads, everyone else was voiced by the same actor (Tom Noonan, replacing Thewlis from the audio drama). 

From there it was the little film that could. Given that Kaufman had gained a decent-sized fan base by then, the grassroots fundraising took quite a journey. Starting with a campaign that involved passing out flyers at Comic Con, they slowly built to a Kickstarter. Their projected goal was $200,000. However, they exceeded their expectations by more than double and thus started to seek traditional funding. Patrons like Adventure Time's Pendleton Ward offered his services to the campaign by saying that he would draw the characters for certain backers. As more studios hopped on board, things began to look more positive for them. 

The big breakthrough was Paramount, who considered backing the film after an executive was impressed. He didn't believe that his positive feedback would cause his superiors to buy it, and yet they did. Along with The Big Short, it became one of their big Oscar pushes for 2015. The film by this point had a two-year production history and stories of unexpected success. Everyone from Kaufman and Starburns Industries was wanting this to be a big hit, and it was starting to look like they might just get their wish. It was going to be different, serving as a more mature, adult alternative to the Pixar frontrunner Inside Out. 

Then it won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice International Film Festival. It became the first animated film in the festival's history to pull it off. As a result, many felt encouraged that it would play a big hit. Considering the focus on both the animation technique and screenplay, many saw, at minimum, a double nomination for Kaufman in both Best Animated Film and Best Original Screenplay. The mature approach suggested that animation could be for adults, playing with techniques that wouldn't work in live action. It was hailed as one of Kaufman's best works, managing to achieve new levels of existentialism that comment on humanity's vulnerability.

Along with Golden Globes and five Annie Award nominations, the film was shaping up to be a big hit. The word of mouth was making its winter release a highly anticipated moment. Even the way people talked about the sex scenes suggested that it was more than a gimmick. Finally, the parallel success of Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hateful Eight suggested that she was having a great year. Everything about the film felt appealing, even on a minor level where the film made a modest $5.7 million at the box office. Everything about the film was designed as the perfect underdog story, and its unlikely enthusiastic fans only helped to make the next step both a profound success, but also a bit of a curveball. 

- The Payoff -

On the one hand, things weren't looking up for Kaufman. This would be his second consecutive film that found him failing to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Ironically, it lost that spot to the other animated film that it battled for most of the year: Inside Out. Then again, it wasn't any better in the category that it stood less of a chance to win in: Best Animated Film. It would earn him another nomination, but it was always up to a bigger challenge with this than the screenplay category. Still, for a film that was considered groundbreaking and pushed boundaries, it was a deserved spot that proved how valuable stop-motion/2D/CGI hybrids could be when meticulously crafted. They could tell richer stories and be successful in balancing humor and existentialism. 

For Leigh, she would also have her own success story, though not for Anomalisa. She would receive a Best Supporting Actress nomination (her first overall) for The Hateful Eight. It would also earn Johnson his first nomination and serve as a major breakthrough for Starburns Industries, proving that they were more than weird late night cartoons. They could do mature and abstract dramas that appealed to adults. Their future looked bright and their chances of making another oddball nominee felt inevitable.

While Kaufman's next film is very unlikely to get an animated nomination, it feels like it may take a lesson from The Hateful Eight in terms of chances at a Best Original Screenplay nomination. Despite being an auteur, Quentin Tarantino's divisive drama failed to get him a screenplay nomination (his first miss since Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and only one in the 2010s). While that came from a variety of other forces that worked against him, it's proven that a lack of nomination isn't a done deal. Even the fact that Kaufman failed to get a nomination for an equally challenging Synecdoche New York proves that it wouldn't be a done deal if 2020 felt so wide open for competition in this field.

With that said, Starburns Industries is under a bit of scrutiny in recent years. Stamatopoulos stopped working with them in 2017, and Harmon departed early in 2020. Who knows what lies ahead for them. Still, their next film is going to be an interesting gambit, and hopefully, one that matches the weirdness. Even without Kaufman in tow, you can argue that they have enough abstract ideas going nightly at [adult swim] to compensate. Then again, this all could've been a fluke. It's hard to say. For now, it's exciting to know that art can still surprise audiences and that the independent success story isn't dead. Sure, it takes some brilliant outsiders to pull it off, but sometimes the stars align, and you get an insightful look into humanity that could only be achieved through puppetry. Now that's saying something.