Although Anne Frank was only thirteen when she began her infamous diary, which she kept until her family was deported just over two years later, its contents, and the events of Frank’s life, have never exactly been kid-friendly material. And yet Israeli director Ari Folman tries, with plenty of earnestness and a fair amount of awkwardness, to render it such in his new animated adaptation, Where Is Anne Frank.
Mixing true events that befell the Frank family during the Second World War, where they hid from the Nazis in a secret apartment in Amsterdam, with a present-day fantasy involving a ghost, a stolen artifact and Europe’s refugee crisis, the film is a strange brew that tries to make the tragedy of the Holocaust more palatable for younger viewers, while drawing parallels with the situation faced by migrants today.
Yet compared to Folman’s harrowing breakthrough Waltz with Bashir, which used realistic 2D animation to chronicle Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Where Is Anne Frank never provides the same kind of emotional gut-punch in spite of Frank’s well-known story, which unrolls through flashbacks and is depicted using a tad too much creative license — such as the director’s decision to portray Nazi soldiers as a swarm of pale monsters from hell, not unlike the White Walkers in Game of Thrones.
While such choices help deliver the darker side of 20th century history in a way that children can digest, the fairytale elements wind up detracting from the film’s overall impact, resulting in a work that’s neither fully for kids nor adults, but rather drifts somewhere in between. This could prove problematic for the $20 million coproduction, which recently opened in France and Belgium after premiering in Cannes this past summer, although as an educational tool it should garner up some interest outside of Europe.
The heroine of Folman’s retelling is not Anne Frank herself (Emily Carey) but rather Kitty (Ruby Stokes), the imaginary friend to whom Frank addressed her diary, and who here becomes a ghost of the present, lurking through the streets of contemporary Amsterdam. Pushed out of the family’s hiding place, which has been turned into a famous museum packed to the brim with tourists, Kitty tries to reconnect with the long lost Anne, unaware that the girl, along with her sister, Margot (Skye Bennett), died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp toward the end of the war.
Desperate to find out what happened, Kitty steals Anne’s original diary from the museum, reading it to discover clues — and to give Folman (who wrote the script) the possibility to revisit Frank’s story as he jumps back and forth between the two time periods. The diary also provides Kitty with her lifeblood — without it she begins to dissipate into strands of ink — and she keeps it by her side as she runs from the cops and crosses paths with a young squatter (Ralph Prosser), with whom she falls in love.
The relevance of the modern-day fantasy material is questionable, although Folman tries to give those sequences substance by portraying, albeit peripherally, the plight of refugees on the streets of the city. It may seem at times like a lopsided comparison to the Holocaust, but the point is to show how deeply innocent families can suffer in both cases. There’s also a bitter irony to certain scenes, like the one where we see migrants sleeping in tents outside the Anne Frank House as hordes of indifferent visitors wait in line, making us wonder if we’re just as guilty as those who didn’t help the Jews in 1941.
It’s a valid question, but Where is Anne Frank takes too many detours from the facts to answer it convincingly. There are also issues with the dialogue, which is stilted and corny in places, whereas the animation is fluidly handled if not nearly as groundbreaking as in Waltz with Bashir (apparently Folman wanted to mix 2D and stop-motion techniques here, but it would have doubled his budget).
Still, there’s a subversive playfulness to the imagery that belies your typical WWII tragedy, and it will no doubt appeal to viewers of the ten-and-under set who are unfamiliar with Frank’s story to begin with. At its best, the movie will serve its pedagogical purpose by giving such kids, and anyone else for that matter, a strong enough sampling of Frank’s wonderful writing to make them want to check out the real thing.
Director: Ari Folman
Screenplay: Ari Folman, based on Anne Frank’s ‘The Diary of a Young Girl’
Cast: Emily Carey, Ruby Stokes, Michael Maloney, Skye Bennett, Sebastian Croft
Producers: Jani Thiltges, Yves Kugelmann, Ari Folman, Alexander Rodnyansky
Cinematographer: Tristan Oliver
Chief animator: Yoni Goodman
Art director: Lena Guberman
Stop motion designer: Andy Gent
Music: Karen O, Ben Goldwasser
Production companies: Bridgit Folman Gang (Israel), Purple Whale Films, Walking the Dog (Belgium), Submarine Films (Netherlands), Le Pacte (France), Samsa Film (Luxemburg), Le Pacte (France)
World sales: Le Pacte
In English
99 minutes
