Anima (Short)
I got sucked in hard by Radiohead’s “Kid A” album when it came out in 2000. I was still in college, and I was still figuring out my musical tastes, and what really engaged me. The music by Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich playing throughout Paul Thomas Anderson’s exciting musical short film, “Anima,” takes me back to that time of discovery. “Anima” is, essentially, an extended-length music video by the “There Will Be Blood” and “Phantom Thread” auteur for his musical friends, and it’s unlike any of his features stylistically. (Although the use of color by he and cinematographer Darius Khondji does remind me of “Punch-Drunk Love.”) If there’s a story to be told in “Anima,” it’s about a worker (Yorke) who catches the eye of a woman (Dajana Roncione) on the commuter train he’s on, and he finds himself chasing her throughout the rest of the video. It’s all a dance to try and get back to her. The music, visuals and choreography all work in sharp precision, and in the second half, there is a rapturous sense of emotion that comes over us as the music, and mood, changes. This is a narrative experiment for the filmmaker, and we get drawn in as it goes into a direction we don’t expect. I might have found myself sucked in to Radiohead again, with the images of Paul Thomas Anderson’s watchful camera adding an entirely new dimension to them.
