Film Review: Where is Anne Frank asks important questions in the present
Where is Anne Frank? Declan Burke film review Caroline Delaney
(PG) is an inventive animation from Ari Folman, who made his breakthrough in 2008 with , an animated film set during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.
Here the main character is Kitty (voiced by Ruby Stokes), the imaginary friend that Anne Frank (Emily Carey) addressed when writing her diaries whilst hiding from the Nazis during WWII.
The film opens with Kitty emerging fully formed from the pages of the original diary in the Amsterdam house that is now the Anne Frank Museum, and wondering where Anne and her family have disappeared to — Kitty, we soon realise, has arrived from the past and has no idea of her friend’s fate. Setting out to find Anne, Kitty takes the diary with her, setting in train a city-wide hunt for the precious artefact and the thief who stole it …
What follows is a fabulously animated story (it’s a marvellous combination of hand-drawn and stop-motion animation) that seeks to discover the real Anne: Kitty, as she traverses Amsterdam, is frequently confronted with images and ideals of her friend that she believes to be untrue.
As the story moves back and forth through time, we get poignant insights into the Frank family’s desperate plight; meanwhile, Kitty discovers that contemporary refugees who arrive in Amsterdam are treated in a way that is hypocritical in a culture that celebrates Anne Frank as something of a secular saint.
The former aspect of the film is superbly done, but the latter rings a little hollow, and grows less convincing the more Folman attempts to hammer home the point.
(cinema release)
