Following a screening at the Toronto Film Festival, the stop-motion film, Anomalisa, was acquired by Paramount for worldwide distribution. The film is co-directed by stop-motion director Duke Johnson and writer-turned-director Charlie Kaufman.
Johnson has worked on a number of stop-motion TV shows and shorts including Mary Shelley’s Frankenhole and Moral Orel. Kaufman, who also wrote the script for the project, is known for penning the scripts to quirky films such as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He directed his first film in 2008 – Synecdoche, New York – which starred the late Philip Seymour Hoffman and Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn).
Anomalisa follows the story of depressed motivational speaker Michael Stone (David Thewlis, Theory of Everything) who meets an interesting woman named Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Spectacular Now) at one of his speaking events. Leigh can soon be seen in the upcoming Quentin Tarantino film, The Hateful Eight while Thewlis will next be onscreen in the Tom Hardy gangster drama, Legend. Both films are due out later this year.
Crowd funding was used via Kickstarter to raise money for the film, generating over $400,000 in donations. The film premiered at the 2015 Venice Film Festival where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize.
No date has been set for a nation-wide release for the film.
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