is the man who is tall happy ?
is the man who is tall happy? is michel gondry' s intellectual spirit quest .
a scene from the documentary “is the man who is tall happy? , ” with noam chomsky .
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so you might expect a conversation between the filmmaker and the philosopher — which frames gondry' s extraordinary new animated documentary
is the man who is tall happy ?
— to be unusual .
the film isn' t a very long one but it is a saturated one, so much thinking on screen. in addition to gondry' s drawings and some photo collages, the director occasionally sketches out a camera and projects footage of chomsky, as if we will forget this is a film. i don' t know whether the tall man is happy, but i do know that
is the man who is tall happy ?
is intellectually and visually groundbreaking, and most certainly a film .
yet that’s exactly the key to its appeal: the centerpiece of “is the man who is tall happy? ” is as much gondry as chomsky; the contrast between them wryly juxtaposes measured and chaotic introspection. by extension, its real topic is the elusive nature of all thought processes, and it effectively shares the dual speakers’ collective journey without revealing any tangible destination. the movie ends, but the discussion resonates indefinitely .
if you know and appreciate the director' s work in feature films ,
is the man who is tall ?
serves to illuminate the filmmaker as much as his subject. the idea of ideas is very much at the core of gondry' s 2006 film
the science of sleep ,
with gael garcía bernal as a man who loses sight of the line between daydreams and reality, and the seminal 2004
eternal sunshine of the spotless mind ,
which examines the implications of a world where disturbing memories can be erased .
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disc # 1 - - is the man who is tall happy? 1. opening credits [ 7: 41 ] 2. earlier life [ 8: 57 ] 3. modern science [ 6: 02 ] 4. cognitive endowment [ 9: 22 ] 5. house of cards [ 7: 35 ] 6. physical changes [ 5: 57 ] 7. embarrassing experience [ 6: 41 ] 8. irrational beliefs [ 7: 42 ] 9. structural analysis [ 9: 11 ] 10. test results [ 6: 42 ] 11. grim conditions [ 7: 06 ] 12. is the man who is tall happy? [: 34 ] 13. ending credits [ 4: 02 ] 14. chapter 14 [ 1: 13 ]
the charles river comment comes from chomsky’s gazing out the window where the two are speaking (chomsky teaches at the massachusetts institute of technology), but otherwise “is the man who is tall happy? ” feels unmoored in time and space. the animated visuals pinwheel through gaudy abstractions and cartoonish reductions of the ideas being discussed, and some of these are extremely beautiful. the drawings don’t accompany chomsky’s comments so much as try to stay on pace with them, and gondry’s questions skitter over the surface while rarely following his subject down the rabbit hole of logic .
in his introductory remarks, gondry blatantly compares his completed project to “a thorn in the heart, ” but it’s better described as a quasi - sequel to “eternal sunshine, ” as it returns to the unnerving challenge of battling the limitations of thought at every waking moment. both movies elegantly blend gentle wit with melancholy. while “eternal sunshine” certainly has more polish, “is the man who is tall happy? ” is like its scrappier, exuberant younger brother. as usual for gondry, the experience can be too precious for its own good, as the fanciful elements of its design lead to the impression of flipping through a scrapbook filled with half - formed ideas .
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there is a bit of the wistful student in that phrase, and in the texture of the film. wistful, insistent, intellectually discontent. gondry' s like the kid in the class who keeps pressing the professor to explain and expound. chomsky is by turns patient and exasperated — - not so much at the probing, but when he thinks gondry doesn' t understand .
probably of interest only to those viewers who, like gondry himself apparently, already have an obsession with chomsky .
the conversation turns personal eventually, with gondry extracting a few details from a man who' s reluctant to speak about his relationship with his late wife or the things that bring him personal happiness. perhaps the difficulty is that chomsky truly doesn' t believe he deserves this kind of individual spotlight - - that like the ship of theseus, which is repaired so often it eventually contains none of its original parts, the person we see onscreen is no more special than any in the sea of humans engaged in a history' s long pursuit of knowledge and justice .
the result is a stop - motion animation that, by their color, dynamic and originality, is quite attractive visually. [ full review in spanish ]
michel gondry merges the worlds of art and science by cleverly animating the innerworkings of noam chomsky’s world - renowned mind. pushing beyond chomsky’s acclaimed theories and opinions, he gives insight into the man behind the legacy. done in hand - drawn animation .
most of the film is framed in 4: 3. however, some sequences extend beyond this .
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we are watching two very fascinating, very different minds interact, and the result is a bit inspiring .
on some topics, the pairing works beautifully. unsurprisingly, this is especially true when chomsky makes points by talking of fairy tales and magic transformations. when a child is told a story about a donkey that is turned into a stone by a spell, how does the child instinctively know that the stone is still in essence the donkey, not some unrelated object? that' s a question made for gondry' s surrealism - friendly brain .
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gondry chalks it up in other ways as well. discourse may be driving the narrative, but what we see on screen is a kaleidoscope of images. gondry uses a colorful neon - bright, hand - drawn, pulsating animation style to show us how he is processing the countless words he is hearing. it' s as if the ideas, rather than gondry, are holding the chalk .
what emerges from the chats and the drawings and the animation is an often - fascinating glimpse at both genius and the creative process (itself a kind of genius, after all). if it sounds boring, it isn' t. if it sounds weird, it is - but weird in a good way .
near the end, chomsky and gondry get into the specific way in which the structure of language impacts thought — it is what the mit professor has spent a lifetime exploring. it is mesmerizing to see those seven words structured, then restructured, chomsky explaining why we choose to place words where, how meaning shifts accordingly .
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one of the pleasures of the movie, though, is that mr. gondry remains acutely tuned into these passages, which he addresses with a startling openness and a lack of directorial ego. this is a movie that celebrates the life of a great mind and makes a case for the mind that knows less but keeps on asking .
the caveat is both unconvincing and unnecessary. if anything, flooding the viewer' s senses with so much stimulation - - drawings that not only illustrate the topic being discussed, but flash and spiral and decorate this imagery without pause - - presents challenges to digesting dense ideas that aren' t present in the standard talking - head nonfiction film. (one wonders what chomsky, who has studied the way brains make sense of the world for so long, would say about this pedagogic strategy. )
imagine that you’re at a dinner party. imagine you start conversing with the man sitting next to you and within minutes realize that he’s far smarter than you’ll ever be — pleasant enough, but talking with him is like falling off the back of a truck and watching it speed into the distance. what do you do? if you’re michel gondry, you sprint like crazy to keep up while doodling on the tablecloth .
among their topics is the sentence that gives the movie its title and that mr. chomsky has used, by moving one word, to argue that the linguistic information children receive is insufficient to explain how they acquire the grammar of language. “it seems plain, ” mr. chomsky has written, “that language acquisition is based on the child’s discovery of what, from a formal point of view, is a deep and abstract theory — a generative grammar of his language — many of the concepts and principles of which are only remotely related to experience by long and intricate chains of unconscious quasi - inferential steps. ”
a. the director' s accent is very heavy, while noam mutters more unintelligibly that usual, making it rather hard to understand them .
it is fitting that tension in the film comes from an issue of
understanding ,
gondry sometimes chalking it up to his thick french accent .
throughout, gondry fancifully embroiders on chomsky’s running commentary. intellectual curiosity is personified as a homunculus toting a potted plant with question marks on its leaves, and galileo’s questioning of accepted truths is represented as a stairway of “why’s. ” gondry might present ideas as rebuses, as descartes’ philosophical “tools” are lifted from his treatise, or else embark on his own sentimental flights; when chomsky first refuses to talk about his late wife, gondry sketches a cartoon man and woman biking across the top of the frame .
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chomsky' s specialty is linguistics and cognitive science. he' s in the business of examining language for clues about life. with chomsky' s help, gondry wants to probe the mit professor' s studies into the way in which words give shape to our world, defining how we humans feel, think and relate in the broadest sense. but gondry is also interested in the specific — chomsky — and how language, ideas and experiences intersect in his very particular life .
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filmmaker michel gondry is a creative thinker as well, though he' s more deconstructive in his methods. enthralled by the process of pulling ideas apart, he' s not content with tipping a single domino, but crashing the entire pile, then setting about to make sense of the jumble .
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in addition to the wide - ranging interviews and the animation, some of gondry' s observations are written out like chalk on a board as he talks. even that simple act — the writing of words, the way an idea slowly comes into focus as the words are put down — becomes a recurring theme .
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their conversations took place over the course of a couple of years starting in 2010. gondry set some arbitrary deadlines because, as he so bluntly puts it in the film, he wanted to show the finished work to chomsky before he died. the professor turns 85 in december .
academic and author noam chomsky is a creative but very structural thinker, stringing ideas together like dominoes. one thought progresses to the next, carefully placed with a logic and precision born of years of linguistics analysis shoring up each one .
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reveals a comfortable gondry on the film work. [ full review in spanish ]
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academic noam chomsky and filmmaker michel gondry delve into language and ideas in the groundbreaking film .
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it’s not the only time gondry casts himself as the slapstick naif on the receiving end of chomsky’s genius. elsewhere, he discusses his struggles to complete the project while in post - production on “the green hornet” years back; as he talks, we see him represented by a giant bug wandering about his living room. it’s a candid admission by implication: while gondry was glued to his work on a commercial spectacle, he was cognizant of its fundamental simplicity in contrast to this deeper side project .
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but not everything fits snugly into gondry’s fairly apolitical worldview. the director gave whimsy a good name in offerings like “be kind rewind” and “the science of sleep, ” and as if acknowledging his shortcomings, he includes examples of his own fractured - english gaffes, and even audio of him interrupting chomsky’s perfectly sane criticism of the french government. gondry dismisses the subject as too depressing, suggesting chomsky instead return to reminiscing about his wife .
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michel gondry directed this animated documentary, which features a number of interviews with renowned linguist noam chomsky. gondry recorded with him over a period of years. the director then used stylized animations in order to help the viewer understand chomsky' s complicated insights into the creation of language, while also illuminating chomsky' s ambitious theories .
i would have loved to hear a good film with some narration concerning naom. instead i got a constant annoying projector and misc sounds interrupting what was otherwise a potentially great film. the graphics were amateurish and often pointless. i felt it discounted from his responses more than enhancing them. i didn' t see the point in the perpetual noise or randomly agitating the viewer with unnecessary sound. i' m not so schizophrenic i need perpetual noise in order to appreciate an otherwise potentially dry point. not that i even think of naom as dry! he' s interesting and all that crud did was detract from his speaking or the ability to focus on it. you' d think you' d want to enhance what he is saying but this film does everything but. it just wasn' t enjoyable... ...... .
gondry’s low - tech approach might even be said to expose the artistic limitations of the big - ticket, reality - based cgi that dominates today’s movie screens. equipped with only an old - time oxberry animation stand, a portable lightbox to facilitate frame - by - frame rendering and the same do - it - yourself gear long accessible to students in animation courses, gondry and his frisky hieroglyphs successfully convey chomsky’s concept of language as the fleeting “meanings we impose on fragmentary experience. ”
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i only wished the well - meaning documentary would have been less cutesy and opened up more doors into chomsky' s progressive thinking .
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how will it play? the documentary world premieres as the closing night of doc nyc on november 21. ifc films releases it in new york and los angeles this friday in addition to making it available on itunes and vod platforms. cross - over appeal to gondry and chomsky fans should result in a solid opening weekend, while vod numbers are likely to remain strong in the coming weeks and months .
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when mr. chomsky diagrams the title sentence with a marker to reveal its grammatical structure, mr. gondry makes those words come richly, cogently, to life .
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we learn quite a bit about chomsky’s early years in philadelphia and how studying hebrew with his father set him on a path toward parsing language down to its rudiments. we learn that his atheism doesn’t dissuade him from understanding how religious beliefs weld people into communities. we don’t learn much about chomsky’s relationship with his wife and colleague, carol schatz, whose death in 2008 is still an open wound .
an almost entirely hand - drawn, animated film that was clearly a labor of love for the director and has enough charm to reach a wider audience than his other recent docs .
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some of the film' s best and most revealing moments see gondry trying to get a slightly wary chomsky to leave his comfort zone of cerebral conjecture and open up about his emotional life .
but viewers likely to be in the audience will have come seeking the very thing gondry seems apologetic about - - not an
objective ,
academic treatment of chomsky' s thinking on language, religion and popular democratic movements, but an engagement with those ideas that employs gondry' s peculiar sensibility. we get that, and how: ever - curious, self - deprecating about occasions in which his fumbling english keeps him from making questions clear, gondry works with sweet earnestness to understand his subject and convey that understanding to us .
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gondry makes some headway in burrowing behind chomsky' s mild academic facade: by asking him about his early life, what he does for entertainment, and about his recently deceased wife, we get a sudden glimpse of chomsky - the - human - being (no doubt entirely trivial ones, if you' re a signed - up chomskyite). but little asides – such as hearing him talk about his parents' interest in cultural zionism, or his regular jail time when his kids were growing up, or just the fact he and his wife liked to be alone with each other – create an unexpectedly rounded portrait .
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on paper, chomsky and gondry seem like an eternal mismatch, but these two very smart people share an odd but genuine chemistry ...
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a series of interviews featuring linguist, philosopher and activist noam chomsky done in hand - drawn animation .
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noam chomsky: totalitarian culture in a free society (oct. 1, 1993 )
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when gondry says he had to do this film with chomsky, you believe him .
french director michel gondry' s new film documents his interviews with american linguist, philosopher and activist noam chomsky, partly via hand - drawn animations .
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michel gondry doodles while noam chomsky philosophizes in an inspired meeting of idiosyncratic minds .
, new york, oct. 30, 2013. (in doc nyc .) running time :
( animated documentary — france) an ifc films (in u. s .) release of a sundance selects presentation of a sleeping train production. produced by georges bermann, michel gondry, raffi adlan, julie fong .
directed by michel gondry. camera (16mm / hd), gondry; editors, adam w. weber, sophie reine; sound, brent lestage; sound editors, gaultier de faultrier, susan goldish; re - recording mixer, de faultrier; animators, gondry, valerie pirson, timothee lemoine .
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is the man who is tall happy ? is a 2013 french animated documentary film by michel gondry about the linguist , philosopher , and political activist noam chomsky . 
is the man who is tall happy? is a 2013 french animated documentary film by michel gondry about the linguist, philosopher, and political activist noam chomsky.
is the man who is tall happy? is a 2013 french animated documentary film by michel gondry about the linguist, philosopher, and political activist noam chomsky.