Anomalisa, film review: Charlie Kaufman brings new depths to animation

"Well, Brian, congratulations. You've succeeded in convincing me that you do have the most tedious f**king job in England," the renegade anti-hero played by David Thewlis tells the security guard (Peter Wight) he befriends in Mike Leigh's 1993 film, Naked.

Thewlis's Mancunian accent is heard again in Anomalisa, the extraordinary new animated feature from Charlie Kaufman, who wrote the scripts for Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and wrote/directed Synecdoche, New York. This is a cartoon but it deals with loneliness, longing and despair in a profound, subtle way that few live-action dramas can match. It also has a caustic humour similar to that found in Leigh's film.

Thewlis is voicing a character who has a job almost as boring as that of Brian, the woebegone security guard in Naked. Michael Stone is a greying, middle-aged businessman who gives motivational speeches about customer service and has even written a book on the subject.

Early on in the film, Kaufman's decision to use stop-motion animation seems baffling. Generally, cartoons are about flights of fantasy, not about business trips to Cincinnati, where Michael is headed to stay overnight and to deliver a speech.

Michael is the kind of character you find frequently enough in US fiction (in John Updike's Rabbit books or in Richard Ford's The Sportswriter) but relatively rarely in films, let alone animated ones. He may be an ex-pat Brit living in Los Angeles but he shares the disappointment and sense of ennui of the middle-aged protagonists in these novels. His marriage has turned sour. Everything seems boring and burdensome to him. When we see him arrive in Cincinnati airport, pulling his suitcase behind him, he looks like a condemned man, trudging to his execution.

The film (which Kaufman co-directed with the animator Duke Johnson) originated as a "sound" play, with the actors sitting on stools reading their lines. The animation reinforces the sense that Michael is living in a world in which everyone looks and sounds the same. As he dreams in the film's most surrealistic scene, they are automatons wearing detachable masks. Almost all of the supporting characters, male and female alike, are voiced by the same actor, Tom Noonan. This adds to the eeriness.

Kaufman and Johnson defamiliarise the most banal episodes in Michael's life and make them seem creepy and strange. The cab driver who takes Michael to the hotel is unctuously friendly, talking in bland generalisations about what Cincinnati has to offer, namely a zoo with pandas and a distinctive way of cooking chilli. The hotel check-in clerk is helpful but robotic.

The film-makers linger on the moments in which Michael first arrives in his suite. As in old Jacques Tati comedies in which Tati is cast adrift in a sleek, modernist but dehumanised world, the chain-smoking Michael struggles to make sense of his surroundings. He tries to hook up with an old girlfriend, uncertain whether he is after sex or love. Michael looks utterly woebegone and yet is shown trying to enjoy himself. He ingratiates himself with two women from Akron, Ohio, who are staying in the hotel and have come to hear his speech. Michael is especially drawn to one of them, Lisa (voiced by Jennifer Jason Leigh), a self-effacing sales representative from Akron who has a scar on her face, which she tries to hide with her big, bushy hair.

Anomalisa has none of the exuberance of a Pixar or DreamWorks animation. There are no talking animals or fireworks here – and its best jokes are the ones about sex toys. Nor, outside the dream sequence, is the film trying to match the visual experimentalism of an animated feature aimed at adults such as Richard Linklater's mind-bending 2001 film Waking Life.

Kaufman wants the film to reflect the flat, mundane quality of Michael's life. Anomalisa doesn't indulge in any false pathos or sentimentality. Even at his lowest ebb, Michael isn't especially sympathetic. One moment he may be rhapsodising about Lisa ("You're extraordinary – it's obvious to me you are") but the next he will be looking with forensic disgust at her teeth as she eats scrambled eggs and tries to talk at the same time.

The film features a frank, very matter-of-fact sex scene. The two awkward lovers, embarrassed about their bodies, try to give each other some pleasure and to convince one another that they are special. It is their shy, hesitant gentleness that makes the scene seem so moving and so intimate in spite of its awkwardness.

Michael's expression doesn't change. We are watching a puppet, not an actor – animation and not live action. Even so, it is in the nature of the way we respond to storytelling on screen that we think we are seeing him register all sorts of different emotions. It is a modern-day example of the Kuleshov effect, the Soviet silent-era experiment demonstrating that audiences read feelings and meanings in faces depending on the way the film is edited. Kaufman's trick is to convince us that his models are as expressive as real-life performers.

The voice work by Thewlis and Jennifer Jason Leigh is crucial to this process. Thewlis manages to convey Michael's world-weariness and sourness, as well as his capacity for tenderness. His speech on customer service is idealistic and straightforward. The secret, he suggests, is treating the customers as humans, not as consumers. "Each person you speak to has had a day. Some of the days have been good, some bad. Each person you speak to has had a childhood. Each has a body and each body has had aches."

Of course, there are multiple ironies here. The empathy he is calling for is all in the name of driving sales. The happier the customers, the more they buy. Michael has not benefited from his own advice. He seems desperate for human warmth and yet recoils when it is offered.

In the week that the new Kung Fu Panda is released, Anomalisa is a reminder that animation can do much more than provide high jinks for a family audience. This is a surprisingly dark film, but it is a lyrical and insightful one. It delves into areas that even the frankest live-action dramas shy away from.