Many movies are made after books and graphic novels. These movies carry expectations with them. People go to such movies after reading the written versions, and expect to see as much as they imagined in their heads while reading the book, on the big screen. There will be comparisons of the interpretation of the written version, characters choices, formatting of the movie, as well as the parallelism of the two genres.
The story of Persepolis is about a girl’s first hand experiences throughout the Iranian Revolution. For the viewer of the movie to understand the reasoning of the format, he or she would have had to have seen the book, which was in graphic novel form. The story was written in the form to convey the true feelings of the girl, who was young at the time thusly having very naïve thoughts. This form of the book worked perfectly as it was meant to by keeping the reader interested and laughing at time, all while showing the true horrors of the revolution in Iran.
The movie accomplished the same intentions by pretty much making the graphic novel animated. The true intentions of the author of this novel would not have made it in any other format of movie. In that sense the director of the movie did a fine job staying true to the book and keeping the same ideas in line, even if the movie and book don’t match exactly. The differences between the book and the novel are quite obvious as movie starts out with the girl in her older years looking back on her past experiences, while in the book, the girl is more or a less the omnipotent narrator. As I said, differences like these do not take away from the plot, but even add to the effectiveness according to the genre.
The movie is in French and subtitled in English, which gets to be a little much as the movie goes along. It is a lot to read pretty quickly, especially for someone who is too lazy to have read the book in the first place. Besides that, the movie portrayed all of the characters nicely, although it wasn’t too hard since the book was a graphic novel. Furthermore, the movie animates the characters very nicely, and just how the reader of the book may imagine them to life.
I would recommend this movie to anyone of any age who may have any interest in learning some world culture and the hardships one young girl had to endure, all while getting a little laugh here and there. It is a well made movie, and is true to the graphic novel when it counts most.
