Where Is Anne Frank? – first-look review

The prob­lem with try­ing to make an adap­ta­tion of Anne Frank’s diary is that it’s awful­ly hard to cre­ate any­thing as mov­ing and poet­ic as the source mate­r­i­al. Although Ari Folman’s aim in updat­ing her sto­ry for a younger audi­ence is a noble one – and as the son of Auschwitz sur­vivors it’s impos­si­ble to deny his con­nec­tion to Frank – he makes more than a few mis­steps along the way.

Orig­i­nal­ly com­mis­sioned by the Anne Frank Fonds in 2009, Where Is Anne Frank? attempts to intro­duce a new gen­er­a­tion to the heart-break­ing true-life tale of the teenage diarist who hid from the Nazis in a secret annex for two years only to die in the Bergen-Belsen con­cen­tra­tion camp in Feb­ru­ary 1945, two months before it was lib­er­at­ed. Folman’s way into the sto­ry is by set­ting it in the present, at the Anne Frank Muse­um in Ams­ter­dam, and con­jur­ing up the char­ac­ter of Kit­ty, Anne’s imag­i­nary friend who she addressed her diary entries to.

There’s some­thing quite off-putting about the char­ac­ter design, inspired by the work of Wes Anderson’s reg­u­lar pup­peteer Andy Gent and illus­trat­ed by David Polon­sky. Kit­ty is intro­duced as a freck­led white girl with red hair whose looks are inspired by the movie stars Anne loves – strange­ly, she is described as hav­ing a ​“slim fig­ure” while the Anne Frank Museum’s cura­tor is por­trayed as a bum­bling fat man. 

It’s dis­ap­point­ing that Fol­man would choose to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between ​‘good’ and ​‘bad’ char­ac­ters based on their size, espe­cial­ly this giv­en the sub­ject mat­ter. The voice act­ing is dis­tract­ing too; pre­sum­ably in a bid to appeal to a mass mar­ket, all the char­ac­ters speak with Amer­i­can or British accents despite the film being set in the Netherlands.

Kit­ty (Ruby Stokes) appears as a ghost­ly fig­ure in the present, search­ing for Anne amid the back­drop of the ongo­ing Euro­pean refugee cri­sis. Fol­man links the treat­ment of cur­rent refugees with the treat­ment of Jews and oth­er mar­gin­alised groups under Nazi rule, and Kit­ty finds a friend in the form of teenage pick­pock­et Peter (Ralph Pross­er), just as Anne (Emi­ly Carey) found one in Peter Van Daan (Sebas­t­ian Croft). She also grows close to a Malian fam­i­ly who are threat­ened by the city’s crack­down on asy­lum seek­ers, all the while try­ing to find out what hap­pened to her best friend.

Although this is an inven­tive take on the Anne Frank sto­ry, and Fol­man does well to draw par­al­lels between the rise of the Nazis and the cur­rent resur­gence of far right nation­al­ism in Europe, it feels wrong to accred­it the words of Frank to Kit­ty. An ear­ly scene in which a pre-war Anne struts down a street explain­ing how all the boys she knows are in love with her is in remark­ably bad taste, while a joke about Justin Bieber’s infa­mous trip to the muse­um in 2013 is just plain cheesy. 

If the film achieves its goal of edu­cat­ing younger view­ers about Anne’s life and the par­al­lels between the Frank fam­i­ly and thou­sands of oth­ers across the globe today, then more pow­er to Fol­man. But the exe­cu­tion is flawed and adult view­ers are unlike­ly to learn any­thing that couldn’t be gleaned from read­ing her diary. 

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