Why Persepolis remains one of the century’s greatest animated films

Based on Marjane Satrapi’s experiences growing up in Iran, the film serves as a sprawling, impressionistic map of the director’s own brain, writes Clarisse Loughrey

Early on, the film plunges into the realm of memory, dissolving into a flashback rendered in stark, expressionistic black and white (Rex)

A woman sits forlorn in an airport terminal. Her head, heavy as a pile of rocks, comes to rest on her hand, as her spine starts to crumple in response. A cigarette protrudes from her mouth. Airports are filled with these kinds of deflated figures. You always wonder what’s on their mind. Heartbreak? Dejection? Disappointment? Ennui? In this instance, the woman is Marjane (Chiara Mastroianni), the protagonist of 2007’s Persepolis, one of this century’s most inventive and provocative animated films. We’re watching her in the depths of an identity crisis.

Marjane is actually Marjane Satrapi, the film’s writer-director, who settled in France as a young woman in order to escape Iran’s oppressive regime. Persepolis serves as an adaptation of her own bestselling autobiographical graphic novel, published in two parts in 2003 and 2004. And she’s alone, at check-in, because she can’t quite summon the strength to return to her homeland. It’s still a place of pain. Suddenly, we see the colours fade. A child sprints across the screen; it’s Marjane’s younger self. From there, the film plunges into the realm of memory, dissolving into a flashback rendered in stark, expressionistic black-and-white.

As a young girl, Marjane operates in the mode of delightful gremlin: spoilt, smart, loud, inquisitive. She’s obsessed with Bruce Lee and carries delusions that she’s a heaven-sent prophet. Her parents indulge her eccentricities. They’re well-to-do socialists in the pre-revolutionary Iran of the Seventies; while the ruling Shah was a dictator who imprisoned several of Marjane’s relatives, her mother and father stayed quiet and lived in relative freedom.