Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (2013)

If Sylvester the Donkey became a rock, we would still see him as Sylvester the Donkey. Even if he has all the properties of a rock, we see him as what he was until he changes back to a donkey. 

This is one of the many interesting, if odd, ideas expressed in Michel Gondry’s new documentary, “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” The film is a series of conversations between director Michel Gondry and famed linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky. Most of the film is Chomsky meditating on Gondry’s questions, set to a series of animations concocted by Gondry himself. 

Gondry begins the film with a minimalist animation of himself sitting at an animating table, scribbling frames onto paper, clicking his camera, and starting a fresh frame. Self-writing cursive streaks across the top of the screen as Gondry reads it in a very thick French accent (which becomes the butt of several self-conscious jokes throughout the film). With this animation, he explains how he discovered Noam Chomsky in a New York video store, the manipulative nature of images, and the premise for his project, which he says he had better start soon because Chomsky “is not getting any younger.”

There are a few more moments like this in the film, where Michel Gondry comments on the moments of his life surrounding the interviews with Noam Chomsky. In this way, “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” is a very experimental film. It’s a project Gondry created almost completely on his own. It’s plotless, unfocused and has no single unifying theme, but what it lacks in cohesion, it makes up for in sheer imagination. Gondry’s animations are so inventive and charmingly rough, they alone are worth the price of admission. 

 

In Michel Gonry’s hands, a piece of work that could have been a straightforward documentary, with standard interview and stock footage, instead becomes a daydream. It’s a parade of fantastic images that feels like watching a person’s thoughts as they develop. 

Gondry’s animated images range from simple to sophisticated, explicit to abstract, serious to silly. Gondry is able to take complex ideas and simplify them to whimsical visual representations; when Chomsky talks about chaos theory and the emergence of complexity from simple systems, Gondry illustrates the idea as a fluctuating green web with simple triangles at its center. 

It had to have taken Michel Gondry a ridiculous amount of work to complete this film; He animated the entire thing himself, by hand, over the course of two years.  “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” can often feel superfluous. It covers a wide range of topics; the birth of modern science, language acquisition, logical paradoxes, the effects of the Holocaust, and so on. Each of these topics is touched on briefly, but the conversation almost always shifts gears before the topics can be explored in greater depth.  

Even so, “Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?” is a fascinating, unique movie. At its core is a conversation between two men who see the world in different ways, and then there are the countless drawings where the two minds meet. It will satisfy viewers looking for food for thought, and their dates they’ve dragged along with them.