Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis is the poignant story of a young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. It is through the eyes of precocious and outspoken nine year old Marjane that we see a people’s hopes dashed as fundamentalists take power – forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands. Clever and fearless, she outsmarts the “social guardians” and discovers punk, ABBA and Iron Maiden. Yet when her uncle is senselessly executed and as bombs fall around Tehran in the Iran/Iraq war, the daily fear that permeates life in Iran is palpable.

I’ve been always quite careful when it comes to adaptation from novels or in this case graphic novels to cinema. I do agree with the author in her making of interview that when they set out to do Persepolis in animation they din’t want to take the comic book as the straight storyboard in motion. This has been the case for instance in Frank Miller’s Sin City where the same shots used by the author in the original comic book are translated exactly the same in film. This is a wrong approach since cinema has its language on its own, and graphic novels, although being closer in the visual point of view, have another one. By doing that that author is just a mere translator from one medium to the other and adds nothing to the piece. So, regardless of Persepolis being an interesting story in the first place(out of gratuitously action packed heroes with superpowers) it is and independent entity from its original format where one could stand alone without the other. What came first doesn’t matter.
It is worth to mention that the animation is impeccable. Not to exaggerated, not to poor, not too realistic, not to much cartoon. A very good balance out of the nowadays full of cliches animation that unfortunately the major animation studios got us used too. All done by hand, in the traditional way like the old days, no signs of any major flash cold perfect crisp line and motion tweening. A good piece fit to stand the past of time, that is more that i can say for the 90% of the animation feature films made today.Good for the french!