Anomalisa

Michael Stone is a respected author and motivational speaker who travels the country teaching people how to communicate with customers. His own life has gone flat: his marriage, his work and the strangers he passes all blur into sameness, and he can barely connect with anyone. On a business trip to Cincinnati for a customer-service conference, he meets Lisa, a sales representative for a bakery company. Her voice and manner strike him as genuinely different from everyone around him, and her arrival opens the possibility of escape from his routine.

The film is a stop-motion animated feature directed by Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, with Kaufman writing the screenplay and producing alongside Johnson and Dino Stamatopoulos. It was Kaufman's second turn as director, following Synecdoche, New York. David Thewlis voices Michael, Jennifer Jason Leigh voices Lisa, and Tom Noonan voices everyone else.

Anomalisa was released at the end of 2015. Made for roughly eight million dollars, it earned about six million worldwide, so its theatrical run fell short of its budget. Reception tells a different story: on IMDb it holds 7.2 from around 79,000 votes, on TMDB 7.1 from a much smaller pool, while a critics' rating of 8.4 from 276 reviews places it clearly higher than either audience measure.