Persepolis: Critic Reviews

The movie sparkles with witty self-awareness.

Persepolis, austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit.

Here is an adaptation so inspired, so simple and so frictionless in its transformation of the source material that it's almost a miracle.

With its powerful fusion of the whimsical, satirical and emotional, Persepolis may well be the most original, inventive and moving film of the year.

Marjane Satrapi, with co-director Vincent Paronnaud, has taken her work and turned it into a vigorous, revealing and tragic film.

It's The 400 Blows viewed from behind a veil and drawn with a graceful, ironic black-and-white pen.

Persepolis is a small landmark in feature animation.

The black-and-white animation won't dazzle your eyes, but everything else about Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud's adaptation of Satrapi's graphic comic book series Persepolis will hold you in its thrall.

The film is mostly in black-and-white, and in a style that draws as much from Charlie Brown as from the style of the novel or the legacy of the German Expressionists.

A film as personal and eccentric as Satrapi's original book, a black-and-white, hand-drawn memoir of growing up and away from Iran.

Few movies capture so well the fluid, fulsome response of children to their (and our) complex worlds.

An exhilarating reminder of what animation can do that other media can't.

There is no denying the boldness of Persepolis, both in design and in moral complaint, but there must surely be moments, in Marjane's life as in ours, that cry out for cross-hatching and the grown-up grayness of doubt.

It might seem that her story is too large for one 98-minute film, but Persepolis tells it carefully, lovingly and with great style. It is infinitely more interesting than the witless coming-of-age Western girls we meet in animated films.

In spite of all the idealistic baggage, the film feels like it's traveling light. The fluid handmade visuals hang onto the uniqueness of Satrapi's heavy-lined work while giving them a smoothness and a visual depth they previously lacked.

The story's greatest value lies in its elegant twining of the universal and the obscure: Satrapi's coming-of-age should be familiar to all, but along with it come startling glimpses of everyday life under the heavy hand of a Muslim theocracy.

A riveting odyssey in pictures and words. It's unlike any journal you've read or any animated movie you've seen.

This French-speaking Iranian cartoon clan is one of the most relatable families I've seen onscreen in ages.

Persepolis may be a crudely drawn, two-dimensional cartoon, but it packs more genuine emotion than plenty of live-action dramas.

By turns whimsical, satirical and poignant to the point of heartbreak.

Any stragglers still unconvinced that animation can be an exciting medium for both adults and kids will run out of arguments in the face of Persepolis.

It is a vivid, at times heartbreaking, portrait of a life and a nation in crisis.

Animated by hand, often in glorious black and white, this French classic has the pathos, wit and intellectual sting of great political filmmaking.

Persepolis is a superb film about a young girl's coming of age amidst war, fascism and family tragedy.

The film has to simplify the story, but it allows more breadth to develop one lovely character particular, Satrapi's beautiful grandmother.