Submarine Channel

Review: Michel Gondry’s “Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?”

Submarine Channel likes innovative documentary filmmakers and animators who create films that are off the beaten track, or films that defy the tried and tested path to box office success. Film distributor Wiepko Oosterhuis of Periscoop Film (a new Submarine initiative) writes about this unusual, rare breed of films. Wiepko dissects Michel Gondry’s animated documentary, Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?

• “Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?” screens in selected cinemas in The Netherlands from 12 November 2015.

Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?

The French wizard of visual imagery has surpassed himself. With “Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy?” Michel Gondry delivers a film about Noam Chomsky that combines documentary and animation in an incredibly fascinating and wonderful way. And in doing so, he succeeds in something that many innovators in visual storytelling dream about; translating speech directly into images. Or better said, translating rational language directly into emotional understanding.

Michel Gondry is known as one of the most visually inventive and distinctive directors on the planet. During the great music video renaissance of the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was the favorite director of music pioneers such as as Bjork, Beck, Daft Punk, Chemical Brothers, Radiohead, and The White Stripes. The latter’s “Fell in Love with a Girl” (2001) was visualized by Gondry as a Lego stop-motion animation. It became one of the most acclaimed and loved music videos of the decade. Not only did he take a simple idea and executed it brilliantly, but Gondry’s images enhanced the lyrics in an unexpected way. If anything, I’d say that that is his defining trademark. Like a small boy playing, he tinkers with props and ideas to create a particular look and feel, which helps evoke the emotion the story needs. His deceptively simple approach is his shortcut to our hearts. That’s why he often forgoes the possibilities of digital imagery. Besides, doing it analogue is a lot more fun, right?

In “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” (trailer), a very romantic sci-fi film about losing the love of your life, Gondry put in an incredible effort into avoiding the use of CGI. Later on he would make the creative community fall in love with the explosion of DIY creativity in both his films “The Science of Sleep” (what worlds can you create using only the stuff you had to work with at nursery school?) and “Be Kind Rewind,” in which famous movie scenes were “sweded” – a made up verb, which means “to re-make something from scratch using whatever you can get your hands on.”

Last year, Gondry turned his eye to the one genre he hadn’t explored yet, non-fiction. Since he was a kid, he’d been a huge fan of Noam Chomsky – the famous linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist and activist widely known because of the 1992 film “Manufacturing Consent.” Chomsky is the man who discovered how language develops and thus he helps us understand how we and our brains work. In “Is the man who is tall happy?” he talks both about his incredible ideas as, for the first time, about his personal life. He explains why children instinctively understand that a donkey that is turned into a rock is still the donkey. Or why a branch taken from a tree, which grows into a new tree, which looks exactly like the old tree and has the same DNA, is not the same tree. But also how he discussed with his father Hebrew classics when he was only 10 or 11.

Chomsky is 86, and still explains his cognitive theories with brilliance and eloquence. Completely fascinating as well as informative. But it is the visual talent of Gondry, who uses images to convey Chomsky’s concepts in a way that is both meaningful and attractive –a skill he has honed over the years– that makes this movie so exceptional and wonderful. He draws associative animations that make Chomsky’s words come to life, helping you understand them without having to think. A very strange experience; it’s like subtitling with images. Sometimes the images and words both vie for your attention, but most of the times Gondry’s approach works like a dream. Is The Man Who Is Tall Happy? stars two very imaginative people from completely different realms, who complement each other in a way not seen before. It’s a film about two very different humans sharing their view on the world and helping us to understand it. One through the power of science. The other through the power of art.

Animating Noam Chomsky | An Afternoon With Michel Gondry by The Creator’s Project: