Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Harmonia (A) on January 12, 2011 at 18:25:55

In Reply to: RE: Jee whiz... posted by Harmonia on January 12, 2011 at 17:58:54

Question: Did you always plan for Perepolis to be an animated film rather than live action?

Marjane Satrapi: " Yes, I think we'd have lost the universal appeal of the storyline. With live-action, it would have turned into a story of people living in a distant land who don't look like us. At best, it would have been an exotic story, and at worst, a "Third-World" story.

The [graphic] novels have been a worldwide success because the drawings are abstract, black-and-white. I think this helped everybody to relate to it, whether in China, Israel, Chile, or Korea, it's a universal story. Persepolis has dreamlike moments, the drawings help us to maintain cohesion and consistency, and the black-and-white (I'm always afraid colour may turn out to be vulgar) also helped in this respect, as did the abstraction of the setting and location. Vincent and I thought the challenge was all the more interesting for this and exciting from an artistic, aesthetic standpoint."

From an interview 2007...politics didn't have anything to do with the selection of medium.