Perse­po­lis

“Ani­ma­tion is like the Wild West,” says Mar­jane Satrapi. ​“Any­thing is pos­si­ble.” Real­ly? Ani­ma­tion may be the Wild West, but its sense of pos­si­bil­i­ty has been horse whipped and run out of town. The cor­po­rate cow­boys are in charge, and unless you’re a CGI pen­guin or wise­crack­ing don­key, you can expect to be on the receiv­ing end of some rough justice.

But for any­body who believes that 2D is dead, Mar­jane Satrapi just brought it back to life. Her debut film, Perse­po­lis, is a black-and-white, French lan­guage, hand-drawn ani­ma­tion set in post-rev­o­lu­tion­ary Iran. And it’s a pow­er­ful reminder that old-fash­ioned val­ues still count: that orig­i­nal­i­ty, cre­ativ­i­ty and risk-tak­ing can take ani­ma­tion beyond the ghet­to of fam­i­ly enter­tain­ment and make it matter.

Of course, 2D nev­er real­ly died, not while the likes of Syl­vain Chomet and Michel Ocelot kept its heart beat­ing. But in Amer­i­ca, tra­di­tion­al ani­ma­tion got the shit kicked out of it by Pixar, and the major stu­dios nev­er quite recov­ered. So what if The Iron Giant proved that there was life left in the hand drawn for­mat? There was a mag­i­cal new dimen­sion out there. CGI was the future, and every­thing else was history.

In 2004, Dis­ney closed its 2D ani­ma­tion stu­dio in Flori­da. And though, iron­i­cal­ly, John Lasseter’s appoint­ment as Chief Cre­ative Offi­cer might reverse the decline, even the pre­vi­ous­ly infal­li­ble Pixar have start­ed to suc­cumb to the law of dimin­ish­ing returns. What seemed like a brave new world has some­how stag­nat­ed. They promised that sto­ry would be king, but it’s for­mu­la and famil­iar­i­ty that rule.

Mar­jane Satrapi may not be able to halt the slide, but she does offer a glim­mer of hope. Work­ing in a Parisian stu­dio with a minis­cule bud­get and an under­ground ethos, she’s proved that there’s still a place at the table for the lit­tle guy. It’s her per­son­al­i­ty that gives Perse­po­lis it’s unique iden­ti­ty, and it’s that iden­ti­ty that makes the film an act of such glo­ri­ous defiance.

Based on Satrapi’s own graph­ic nov­els, Perse­po­lis begins as a child’s eye mem­o­ry of the Iran­ian rev­o­lu­tion. It’s 1979 and Mar­ji (voiced as a young­ster by Gabrielle Lopes, and as an adult by Chiara Mas­troian­ni) is a nine-year-old girl whose child­hood dreams of Bruce Lee and shav­ing her legs are replaced by the alto­geth­er more adult excite­ment of pol­i­tics. As their par­ents march into the bul­lets of the Shah’s army, kids chase the off­spring of sus­pect­ed secret police­men, or chant slo­gans that they only half understand.

Mar­ji is spell­bound by her Uncle Anouche, a ​‘comu­niss’ who has been released from jail to help plan the future of the coun­try. But what began as a people’s upris­ing morphs into an Islam­ic rev­o­lu­tion, and though Anouche clings to the belief that the peo­ple will choose free­dom, he is soon back in jail, the veil is intro­duced, and alco­hol and music are banned. In the midst of this upheaval, Mar­ji under­goes her own rad­i­cal changes. The excit­ed girl gives way to a rebel­lious teenag­er who is sent to Europe for her own safe­ty. And though she returns to Iran, it is only to set the scene for a final farewell.

In Per­sian his­to­ry, Perse­po­lis was the half-built cap­i­tal of the ancient empire. To Satrapi, it becomes a mon­u­ment to bet­ter times only half remem­bered, and per­haps only half true, but a pow­er­ful touch­stone nonethe­less. And that, indeed, is the heart of her film: it’s a poem of exile and dis­lo­ca­tion and the keen­ly felt love for home and family.

Marji’s par­ents are beau­ti­ful­ly drawn, and there’s a heart-wrench­ing scene when she leaves them at the air­port to begin her ill-fat­ed life in Vien­na. But the stand­out char­ac­ter is her grand­moth­er, voiced by Danielle Dar­rieux, who rep­re­sents anoth­er con­nec­tion to the old Iran, not just before the rev­o­lu­tion but before the Shah. While Mar­ji is a pas­sive hero­ine, tossed around by fate and cir­cum­stance, her grand­moth­er is the rock that she clings to.

Their scenes togeth­er are so affect­ing, so clear­ly expe­ri­enced, that it feels like you’re intrud­ing on a pri­vate mem­o­ry. Then in a flash, Satrapi will evoke a moment as when jas­mine flow­ers fall from her grandmother’s bra, and you can only mar­vel at its expres­sive beauty.

And yet this high­ly per­son­al sto­ry reach­es out beyond the per­son­al expe­ri­ence of its author. The Tehran that we see before the rev­o­lu­tion could be Lon­don or Paris or New York. Though the polit­i­cal atmos­phere was tox­ic, for most Ira­ni­ans life was, well, life. It meant par­ties and friends and fun. And even after the rev­o­lu­tion, when ​“every aspect of our lives changed, and so did we,” the peo­ple of Iran found ways not just to sur­vive, but to car­ry on liv­ing. Par­ties moved under­ground and sex became more dis­crete, but life became a sto­ry of every­day rev­o­lu­tions, each one a vic­to­ry against the system.

For­get the film’s colour scheme: by show­ing us this unseen side of Iran, Satrapi has tak­en a black-and-white issue and invest­ed it with a new sense of sub­tle­ty. The Iran that we see every day – the ​‘axis of evil’, the ter­ror­ist state – is not the Iran of the Iran­ian people.

Our media would tell us that Ira­ni­ans are defined by hatred; what Perse­po­lis shows is the pal­pa­ble sense of dis­be­lief that enveloped the coun­try. They are angry just as we would be angry at the lies, the sex­u­al hypocrisy and the dehu­man­is­ing absur­di­ty of the new régime – one in which a win­dow clean­er can become a gov­ern­ment min­is­ter because he grows a beard and hates women.

But in show­ing that the peo­ple of Iran are no dif­fer­ent from us – were not in some way pre­dis­posed towards accept­ing a repres­sive régime – Satrapi sug­gests that it could hap­pen just as eas­i­ly to us. And before we laugh at the sug­ges­tion, it’s worth glanc­ing uneasi­ly over the Atlantic at a coun­try where a Cre­ation­ist can run for pres­i­dent; or clos­er to home where a lib­er­al politi­cian can’t admit to being an athe­ist with­out a tor­tured apology.

There is, in that sense, a veiled crit­i­cism of the West, although far more damn­ing is what hap­pens to the coun­try after it is invad­ed by Iraq. Here, Perse­po­lis assumes an apoc­a­lyp­tic tone, tak­ing its visu­al cues from wartime pro­pa­gan­da posters and its pac­ing from the per­cus­sive beat of sui­cide bomb­ings. The war, financed and encour­aged by the West, changed every­thing in Iran.

“Only one rule will pre­vail,” announces a wild-eyed mul­lah, ​“that of blood!” As young men are offered a plas­tic key to heav­en where they’re promised an end­less sup­ply of vir­gins, the ugly cult of mar­tyr­dom takes hold, dec­i­mat­ing the coun­try. These are the film’s angri­est scenes, and though the pri­ma­ry tar­get remains the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment, they’re hard to watch with­out a sense of guilty com­plic­i­ty. Per­haps that accounts for the ambiva­lent shot of a Vogue cov­er, which hints sug­ges­tive­ly that the dan­gers of West­ern impe­ri­al­ism might be real.

If all this sounds like a veiled his­to­ry les­son, don’t wor­ry. Though it occa­sion­al­ly laps­es into expo­si­tion – as when Uncle Anouche recounts the sto­ry of his exile – these are often the film’s most visu­al­ly arrest­ing moments. They’re deli­cious­ly exot­ic; like read­ing from some ancient Ara­bic text dec­o­rat­ed with obscure artis­tic motifs. Some clever dis­solves, wipes and play­ful fades give Perse­po­lis a kind of non-lin­ear qual­i­ty, as if the scenes in front of you aren’t being scanned con­sec­u­tive­ly, but have rather been dragged up from some place deep inside like a recov­ered memory.

And besides, for all the film’s polit­i­cal sym­pa­thies, it grad­u­al­ly reveals itself to be less a lament for some bygone age as a cel­e­bra­tion of the here and now. Despite the exile, the hijab and the near fatal mis­takes, above every­thing Mar­ji rep­re­sents the defi­ant pos­si­bil­i­ties of youth. That’s some­thing no régime can deny, even when they remove its sym­bols and trap­pings. It’s that youth­ful spir­it that keeps her alive (as cap­tured in arguably the great­est movie mon­tage of all time, bril­liant­ly scored to ​‘Eye of the Tiger’) and, more­over, keeps her coun­try alive too, what­ev­er the price.

Though it’s always tempt­ing to give cred­it to an indi­vid­ual author, in truth, Perse­po­lis is tes­ta­ment to the incred­i­ble work of the entire team assem­bled by Satrapi and her co-direc­tor Vin­cent Paron­naud. Paron­naud him­self appears in a small cameo – a reflec­tion of his humil­i­ty rather than the role he played in the film’s production.

Like­wise, every sin­gle artist who spent hours hand-draw­ing over 600 char­ac­ters, and those who traced every last frame in black ink, and the back­ground design­ers and the colourists and all the rest deserve every word of praise that comes their way. Because these are the peo­ple prov­ing that it’s not just the brave new world that counts, it’s the artistry and won­der of the old one too.