Where Is Anne Frank

Anne Frank’s story of the Holocaust is revisited in an animated feature from the director of Waltz with Bashir.

Ari Folman is not the most prolific of directors and still remains best known for the film that he made back in 2008, Waltz with Bashir. As an instance of animation being used to deal with serious real-life issues (it concerned Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982) it has become a classic. Since then, Folman has made other features eschewing or making limited use of animation, but this new piece is technically in the same mould as Waltz with Bashir. Nevertheless – and despite the fact that it does draw strongly on the celebrated tragic history of Anne Frank – this is a very different kind of film. Significantly, it is less a retelling of Anne Frank’s story than an investigation into what relevance this young Jewish victim of the Nazis has in today's world. That's a subject which allows Folman to adopt an approach that is extremely free and even in some respects fantastical.

The diaries kept by Anne Frank in Amsterdam while she and her family were in hiding between 1942 and 1944 and which would make her famous in spite of her death at the age of fifteen were addressed to an imaginary friend whom she named Kitty. Taking his cue from that, Folman makes the 13-year-old Kitty his protagonist. She comes alive in the 21st-century during a lightning strike by literally emerging from the pages of the diary kept in the Anne Frank house. In so far as the film recreates the past, it shows Anne in company with Kitty whom she has conjured up as a non-Jewish alter ego while in modern times – the movie is said to take place a year from now – Kitty is free to wander through Amsterdam amazed to discover that Anne is memorialised everywhere but horrified when she eventually learns that her friend did not survive the war.

Earlier this year we saw the brilliant Flee, a film about a real-life Afghan refugee which illustrated perfectly how an animated feature about serious events can draw an emotional response from viewers who cease to feel that they are looking at drawings. That is never the case here given that the fanciful approach leads to varied tones and styles being adopted within the animation. The variations arise as the film veers between past and present, between passing flights of fancy and historical facts and between images that closely echo reality and others that are very deliberately stylised (for example, the Nazis seen on the streets of Amsterdam are symbolically monstrous in appearance).

The fact that we are so consciously aware of the varieties of technique used would matter greatly if Folman were simply retelling Anne Frank’s history and, indeed, it does lessen the emotional impact of the story. But it is not out of keeping with his wish to make viewers question what Anne Frank means today. Her story may be one that keeps memories of the Holocaust alive, but it is also something that can be thought of as having become highly commercialised. She is tourist bait (arguably the film is unjustly cruel in its depiction of visitors to the Anne Frank house filing through as they tick off another historical site on their must-see list). Furthermore, it may be the case that Anne is now an encouragement to dwell on the past rather than to focus on the present. Indeed, for the younger generation it may be easy to dismiss her history as an old tale not relevant to them.

In making Where Is Anne Frank Folman is confronting these possibilities head-on. He has created a film with a fresh tone, one that might in itself engage with youthful viewers. He has shown Anne as a teenager whose experiences can be recognised by today's adolescents and, most importantly, he is asserting that what we need to learn from Anne’s tale is to avoid the inhumanity that made her a victim. He is not suggesting that harsh attitudes to immigrants and refugees today are on the same scale as the antisemitism of the Nazis, but he is saying that hostility born of stressing the difference of others links the world of the 1940s to the world of today. As a fresh calibration of what can usefully be learnt from Anne Frank’s story in the 21st-century, he has given us a film which does not always satisfy and which fails to fully cohere stylistically.  But what Where Is Anne Frank does achieve is to be consistently thought-provoking - and that's enough in itself to give this film value.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Voices of  Ruby Stokes, Emily Carey, Sebastian Croft, Michael Maloney, Skye Bennett, Ari Folman, Nell Barlow, Ralph Prosser, Mike Tehrani, Naomi Mourton.

Dir Ari Folman, Pro Jani Thitges, Yves Kugel Mann, Ari Folman and Alexander Rodnyansky, Screenplay Ari Folman based on the diary written by Anne Frank, Ph Tristan Oliver, Pro Des Lena Guberman, Ed Nili Feller, Music Karen O and Ben Goldwasser, Animation Dir Yori Goodman.

Bridgit Folman Film Group/Doghouse Films/Magellan Films/Samsa Film/Submarine/Walking the Dog/Le Pacte-Altitude Film Entertainment.

100 mins. Belgium/Luxembourg/Israel/The Netherlands/UK/USA/Switzerland/France 2021. US Rel: 18 March 2022. UK Rel: 12 August 2022. Cert. PG.