Anomalisa is instantly recognisable as a Charlie Kaufman film as soon as the first lines of dialogue start meshing over each other in voiceover. It's no great wonder why he is one of the best screenwriters working in the U.S.- he has such a strong and distinctive style of structure and dialogue. Like every other Kaufman film, the protagonist is a reflection of his author, to certain degrees.

A brief summary: Michael Stone, an author of books on the subject of customer service, struggle with his inability to connect to people. One night, while on a routine business trip, he meets a stranger who changes his world view.

Michael Stone is exhausted by the mundanity of life, his inability to interact with people successfully. In brilliant fashion, using the medium of stop-motion to great narrative strength, every single person's face consists of a simple, repeatable, mass-produced face mould. At first, the viewer thinks that this is simply the style of the animation, until Michael meets Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh) - who has a scar on one side of her face, and a unique voice. Her voice is unique, because apart from Michael and Lisa, every single person in the film is voiced by Tom Noonan, male or female, young or old. It adds to the pervading surreal feeling of the film, and is used to great effect in a emotionally-crushing climax. Kaufman's meta-aware construction of the film allows it to exist in it's own world, a few degrees off of reality, but not enough to not reflect it's real-world comparisons.

The writing is excellent, as expected, and the rest of the film's production is of high quality too. The cinematography is excellent, simple, dynamic when it needs to be; the set design is carefully crafted, and the puppet design is some of the best seen on film to this day. Animated by Starburns Industries (Dan Harmon's company), the animation and lighting is some of the best. A great touch to the puppet design is that they all have realistic bodies - when Michael Stone undresses, he has a standard middle-aged body, with a bit of a belly, and folds of skin. This taken advantage of to the fullest extent of realism one can achieve with puppets, culminating in an extended and surprisingly realistic sex scene. It says something about Hollywood's attitude to sex in film that puppets can do it better. The facial expressions are also remarkable - they seem almost human. Lisa is also created in the image of a realistic woman, not a Barbie doll. The puppets were created using 3D printing technology, which probably is the reason why they look almost hyper-realistic - despite the occasional, unexplained and creepy malfunctions of Michael's face plate.

This level of ambiguity revealed in the audio-visual elements of the film work in conjunction with the fairly normal (if not Kaufmanicised) dialogue to successfully walk a difficult line of ambiguity. Kaufman could easily have never produced anything, if he was self-indulgent in his themes of loneliness and disillusionment, yet his prowess lies in showing multiple angles on these pains of human existence. Charlie Kaufman creates a film about the painful mundanity of life, creating a more tragic than comic film that will affect those who manage to see it profoundly.