Persepolis Movie Review

I have never really heard of “Persepolis” until I was in English 1106. I thought it was really interesting, yet somewhat strange, that such a serious topic was portrayed in a graphic novel. After reading, however, I was blown away. I think this is probably one of the best ways to depict a situation like this. Since I had never heard of the novel, I definitely didn’t know there was a movie to go along with it.

I’m not going to lie, I had very different expectations of this film. I thought it was going to be a lot different than it actually was. When the lights dimmed down and the projector started running, I was expecting real, live people to pop up and start telling the story of a little girl caught in the middle of the Iranian revolution. I was hugely mistaken. It was like the comic all over again. I was a little disappointed because I didn’t think that the film would be all that great animated. It didn’t even seem animated compared to the amazing digital graphics we have today. It was almost as if it was the comic in a flipbook style. The way the pictures moved throughout the film was like a bunch of drawings shown really fast one after the other.

After I got over the fact that there weren’t actual people in the film, I began to watch it a little bit closer. The way the movie was portrayed isn’t really the traditional way of showing a film. This ties in to the reasoning for the graphic novel as well. It makes you think a little more than you would for a blockbuster film.

The film was clearly made for a French audience, yet somehow I feel like the subtitles made the movie that much better. I felt like I had to concentrate that much more on the movie and the meaning, rather than just becoming a vegetable right when the movie starts rolling.

The film starts off in present time. The characters are in color, and if you haven’t read the book, you don’t really know what’s going on. Then, Marji starts to recall the past, and that is when the story really starts. It all starts when she is a little girl. The revolution hasn’t quite started yet, but people are starting to rise up. The story goes on to tell about Marji’s life as she becomes a young woman.

The comic is quite different than the film. Of course, not everything that is written down on paper will be in the film, but there are some things that aren’t in the text either. For example, some of the language in the movie is a little more on the explicit side, whereas the text might not be able to show that.

Some scenes in the movie were a lot more drawn out than in the text. For example, when the police pulled Marji’s family over and followed them to their house, the film took more time to explain what actually happened. The novel just said that they emptied the bottles, and that was it. On the contrary, there are many scenes that are more drawn out in the text. When Marji’s family is visiting with their family friends, and the husband is telling everyone about his torture in jail, we get a lot more description in the comic.

An actual movie critic would probably have a lot more to say about this than any amateur Virginia Tech freshman. However, we have all read the book and watched the movie, which makes our credibility fairly outstanding. I would definitely recommend either the graphic novel or the film to anyone, not just people who like graphic novels, or the Iranian revolution. This novel and/or film should be read and/or watched sometime in a person’s life.