Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud adapted her graphic novel over producers’ resistance to animation; knowing how hard it would be, they steered her towards live action and offered an original script instead. She refused and said why: live action would have made it a story about people in a distant land who do not look like us, exotic at best, a third world tale at worst. The form is a decision about where the story sits. Twenty animators made it; two dimensional methods on pen tablets were tried first and dropped for poor definition. The framing scenes in the present are in colour, part of the past like shadow theatre. At Cannes in 2007 it shared the Jury Prize with Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Light. At the 33rd César Awards it won best first feature and best adaptation, losing in film, editing, sound and music; at the 80th Academy Awards Ratatouille beat it for animated feature. Iran protested the Cannes screening, Bangkok dropped it from a festival, a Lebanese ban was later lifted, and in February 2008 Tehran allowed limited screenings with six scenes cut. A good fit if you take the plainness of the line as a choice, not a limit. Not for viewers who find repression and execution kept in the same register as childhood scenes too heavy.