A storm rages in Amsterdam, but that doesn’t deter visitors from lining up outside of the Anne Frank House to get a glimpse of her famous diary and gaze upon the rooms she once inhabited. A home address refashioned as a must-see tourist attraction for quick photos and perhaps some short-lived introspection. Outside its doors, a family of refugees becomes homeless when the inhospitable weather tears apart their makeshift shelter.
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That’s how Ari Folman’s spellbinding animated feature “Where Is Anne Frank” opens, a storytelling epiphany that reframes the past and interrogates our present. Its rhetorical title takes on a literal connotation via a revitalizing rendering of the eponymous teenager’s final years. No stranger to the animated medium, Folman exploits it for all its narrative potential to cross over time and space, and for its capacity to serve as a poetic vehicle for real-life harshness. The Oscar-nominated “Waltz with Bashir” vouches for his approach.
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Told from the naive vantage point of her imaginary pal Kitty (voiced by Ruby Stokes), who searches for her in the modern world, the film invokes parallels between the Holocaust and the current humanitarian crises of displaced people from Africa and the Middle East. These don’t equate the two nor imply the root causes respond to a similar context but speak to Otto Frank’s conviction that saving even one life is a worthwhile undertaking.
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With a responsibility to the sacred source material, the Israeli writer-director straddles a tonally challenging line between the subtly educational, the aesthetically lyrical, and the incisive assessment of Anne Frank’s multi-shaded personality. “Where Is Anne Frank” is decidedly mature but still targets the same demographic that would read the original book in school: adolescents able to grasp its moral intricacies.
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Folman first adapted Anne Frank’s diary in a more direct manner as a graphic novel illustrated by David Polonsky, so his familiarity with the text, its humor and horror, qualifies him to reformat the account with audacious ingenuity
Sporting Disney-like sensibilities, with the facial structures resembling some features of anime figures, the delightful character design, including that for Anne (played by Emily Carey), evokes the style of Folman’s previous print effort but was envisioned for animation by artist Lena Guberman.
This hand-drawn animated vision, as if created digitally, is wondrous and magical as a visually elaborate take on Saturday morning cartoons, and at times it’s exactly that while being immensely more sophisticated in narrative structure and themes. There’s great depth to the environments given that some of the backgrounds were first created as physical miniatures with the drawn characters brought in later.
Ink from the revered diary gives life to Kitty. As she rises from the aged paper, she discovers her invisibility to people around as long as she remains inside the museum. The colored liquid that floats and dissolves in the air also functions as a portal for Kitty to reconnect with her time with Anne, first in her family’s home and then in their hiding spot. Ink is animated almost as a life form, which is one of the most impressive effects in the movie that also reads like a strong motif.
If Kitty gets too far from the object holding the words that granted her existence, she fades away. A metaphor, perhaps, for how we’ve lost sight of Anne’s ordeal as a Jewish person in Nazi-controlled Europe. As we forget and stray from the path of compassion, our humanity also begins to vanish.
As Kitty navigates our reality, oblivious to Anne’s ultimate fate, she learns of the Dutch government’s planned deportation of people in need. Her disappointment mounts. The time-traveling ink girl angrily realizes that the tragedy of Anne’s death has been commodified, the nuances of her life brushed over, and the significance of her resilience amid the atrocities taken for granted.
The Dutch capital is now plagued with places named after the girl-turned-symbol, but the essence of what her plight should have taught mankind is nowhere to be found. The physical artifacts of her memory hold more value to us now as relics than their timely implications, it seems.
To investigate where her best friend and creator is now, Kitty steals the precious diary, launching the authorities into a desperate hunt. As Kitty travels back and forth between the 1940s and today (a year from now to be precise), we are treated to a layered portrait of Anne with a range of qualities, flaws, and concerns, including her estranged relationship with her mother, her romantic pursuits, and how she understood death through the lens of Greek mythology. This interest in ancient philosophy elevates one of the most devastating scenes with stunning imagery.
Meanwhile, Kitty questions our current interpretations of Anne’s life and our obsession with monuments. Over the course of her time here, she has her own crush on Peter, a rebellious boy that helps her in her quest and shows her how migrants are marginalized. In this fiction Anne lives vicariously through Kitty. Karen O and Ben Goldwasser’s original songs and score accompany the heroine. The singer’s soothing, yet potent voice injects a melancholic atmosphere for a beautifully appropriate effect. These tracks are golden.
Folman’s writing is so deft that he even inserts conflict between Kitty and Anne, with the former demanding to know the reasoning behind her distinct physiology. In another strong visual choice, the Nazis appear as cloaked figures with white masks—also evoking Greek theater—otherworldly and terrifying. Their voices are never heard, but their presence is unequivocally malevolent in dehumanized fashion.
The extent of the detail in the production design, with its bright color palette that reacts distinctively to the opposing time periods and multiple locations across, astounds for its meticulousness. Charmingly bright tones drench Anne’s pre-war school days, but in hiding she’s trapped in dimmed, yellowish light with limited access to windows. Winter in present-day Amsterdam is in turn devoid of hue variation. Unlike other animated features dealing with social justice issues, Folman only deploys full-on fantasy on specific occasions to soften thematic darkness. Instead, whimsy is embedded in the concept itself through Kitty.
Like Folman’s “Waltz,” a work about the Lebanon War, “Where Is Anne Frank” also observes how we take on or avoid the shameful passages of both our personal and collective past. Even if at times one can detect a didactic quality to some of the dialogue, explaining certain historical aspects, the artistry of the animation and Folman’s deliberate rendition of Frank’s temperament, divert our focus from those slightly more overt touches.
Tacitly, what Folman seems to demand is that if we are going to co-opt Frank’s former abode and her private thoughts on the book that’s become synonymous with her, then we must also address the full extent of the unspeakable degradation she endured and how our apathy and lack of empathy are allowing other abhorrent injustices to occur right in front of us. The climax to “Where Is Anne Frank,” brims with hope and sincerity that could label as sentimental, but in the context of this transcendental emotional expedition, it’s an earned necessity to believe we can actually grow and genuinely care for others. [A]
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