Charlie Kaufman’s new, long-in-the-works movie Anomalisa screened at the Toronto International Film Festival earlier this fall, where The A.V. Club’s A.A. Dowd saw it and said it lived up to his (admittedly high) expectations. (The word “triumph” was specifically invoked.) Now the first trailer for the film has been released, playing up the seeming paradox of a story about human nature that’s told entirely with stop-motion puppets.
Produced with the assistance of Starburns Industries—the company that also served as Geppetto to Moral Orel and Community’s famous stop-motion Christmas episode—Anomalisa features the voice of David Thewlis as Michael Stone, a motivational speaker who fixates on Lisa (Jennifer Jason Leigh), an awkward fan he encounters mid-existential crisis while staying in a Cincinnati hotel. (In a predictably quirky twist, every character in the film besides Lisa and Michael is voiced by a monotone Tom Noonan, which is enough to give anyone a bad case of the “what’s the point, anyway?”s.) Fans craving that distinctly Kaufman-esque sensibility only have a little less than two months to wait, as Anomalisa comes out in limited release on December 30.