The Daily Cross Hatch » Persepolis directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis
Directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi
Sony Pictures Classic

Ever since Superman hit theaters in 1978, our country has been obsessed with movies about superheroes. Superman, Batman, X-Men, Spider-man, The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk—it’s difficult to name a successful superhero book that has yet to make its way onto the big screen.

Movies based on indie comics are a much rarer breed. Arguably, the two forerunners would be Ghost World and American Splendor, both of which garnered much praise and received Oscar nominations, but when you look at box office numbers, the original Superman grossed more in its opening weekend, nearly a quarter of a decade prior. Even the mid-90s superhero movies that were relative box office bombs (The Shadow, The Phantom, and The Rocketeer) put the aforementioned indies to shame in terms of profit.

Chosen by France as the country’s official foreign language film representative to the Oscars, and grossing almost as much as Ghost World in its first weekend in the U.S., Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis seems poised to become the third in this short line of critically successful movie adaptations of alternative comics. And yet, the movie, which is based on Satrapi’s best-selling two-book graphic novel memoir, sets itself apart from both its indie predecessors and the superhero flicks that are, in some sense, its cousins three-times-removed—by being an animated film.

The bulk of comic adaptations share the common thread of not being animated. American Splendor hinted at its roots by working in some occasional animation, but ultimately is a movie acted by–and focused on–real people. The successful superhero movie, The Incredibles, was an animated work but an original one, not based on any comic. In some ways, this trend isn’t entirely shocking; an adaptation intends to take an original work and re-create it as something new. So stories told only in words, turned into movies—this makes sense; hand-drawn comic book characters turned into real people—this makes sense, too; but comic characters turned into animated characters? Why bother?

Persepolis boldly takes this issue, rendering it void by relating itself very closely to its graphic novel roots, while asserting its independence as a distinct work of art. The books are characterized by Satrapi’s simple black-and-white style, expressed in thick, dark lines that weigh heavily on the page. The movie maintains her quirky style, while lifting it off the page and making it lighter, an effect that owes much to the addition of gray to the film’s palette, softening the contrast and giving the art a measure of depth not present in the novels. Characters, too, float or tumble on- and off-screen, and in turn the movie seems to dance along in its own time. Satrapi and her co-director Vincent Paronnaud have quite literally animated Persepolis by infusing a new kind of energy and life into its drawings. It’s a beautiful thing to behold.

Overall, the film stays true to the novels by telling Satrapi’s story primarily through personal vignettes. These make the larger concepts she is confronting, like revolution and exile, easier to grasp. We come to understand the horror of war when Marjane returns from school to find her street bombed and some of her neighbors killed; cultural repression is filtered through a hilarious scene in which two older women harass her for wearing a Michael Jackson button and a jacket that says, “Punk is not ded [sic].” At times, the movie struggles with choppiness as it attempts to transition from one anecdote to the next, and of course, if you’re a fan of the books, not all of your favorite moments will get the screen time you desire.

But that’s okay, because Persepolis, the movie, isn’t trying to be Persepolis, the book. The only question that still stands, in the face of another Batman movie as well as a 2009 adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, is why Americans love superheroes so damned much.