Film

Transformed into an animated film (and supersized with voices by a who’s who of Gallic cinema), Satrapi’s fondly regarded comic-strip autobiography is at once refreshingly different and completely familiar. You’ve never seen a biopic that shows such a vivid child’s-eye view of political upheaval—in this case, Iran’s Islamic revolution, which our heroine first struggles to comprehend as she protests the shah in her living room, and later, under the ayatollah, as she buys contraband music on the black market and comes to terms with a world in which a window washer is placed in charge of a hospital. The simple, curvilinear black-and-white animation feels appropriate to the material: Marjane’s outlook on events is always slightly skewed and caricatured, and the visuals keep Persepolis striking to the eye even during its less dramatically satisfying patches.

At the same time, the movie—somewhat typical of memoirs—tends to rise and fall on the strength of its episodes, and once Marjane relocates to Vienna for high school, Persepolis begins to veer into solipsism. The movie accords as much weight to her epic breakup with a bland hunk as it does to her uncle’s death as a political prisoner. Not surprisingly, the film picks up again after she returns to the more volatile milieu of Iran, where as an art student she studies Botticelli with the nudity blackened out. Still, if you can get through the indulgent parts—Marjane’s “Eye of the Tiger”–scored comeback montage feels particularly unnecessary—it’s difficult not to be moved.