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Where Is Anne Frank Movie Review

Where Is Anne Frank is a 2021 international animated film directed by Ari Folman. It is a subpar effort from this usually much more interesting director.

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“Being Jewish means making a decision that

you’ll take on the Jews’ destiny and their history“

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Kitty, Anne Frank’s imaginary friend to whom the famous diary was dedicated, comes to life in the modern day in the Amsterdam house where Anne had taken refuge with her family. Kitty embarks on a journey to find Anne, who she believes is still alive. My main issue with this movie is that it’s utterly redundant in its plot.

While the trailers were great and the efforts to appeal to a younger audience were admirable, the end result is never as fun as it should have been in order to bring in younger viewers. In fact, the movie is rather pedestrian, slowly paced and hardly holding attention even for adults.

The magical realist aspects worked and some of the different depictions of the historical figures and events through stylized animation were interesting, but the film’s plot felt overly lacking in both emotion and dramatic impact. It is both an uneventful and a surprisingly hollow picture.

A couple of sequences were emotionally effective and/or thematically resonant. Again, the magical realist parts were the highlights in an otherwise chaotic film that is both weakly edited and surprisingly badly structured as it’s incoherent throughout.

The animation is very strong. They intended at first to make a stop-motion flick and I wish that they stuck with that decision, but those stop-motion elements that are there are still great and the hand-drawn style was excellent. The character designs and the fantastical sequences were both terrific.

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Where Is Anne Frank ultimately failed in the Kitty character. I did understand her point of existence, but the eventual execution of her story and the editing of both her and Frank’s storylines were beyond messy and far from as elegant as this type of structured film needed. The voice acting is also rather bland and ineffective, rendering the movie’s emotional resonance to to even smaller degrees. Again, I appreciated the ambition of this film, but the execution counts and it simply wasn’t good in this case.

Where Is Anne Frank had a very interesting, ambitious premise, but the execution counts and it was very messy in this case. It is a well animated, interesting film in its magical realist scenes, but the main character did not work, the voice acting was bland, the structure was chaotic and the emotional resonance was utterly lacking.

My Rating – 3