Somehow I didn’t expect Where is Anne Frank, which centres on the enigmatic Kitty of Anne’s eponymous Diary (here depicted as an imaginary friend), searching for Anne in modern-day Amsterdam, to be so literal. The animated film offers a completely fresh and explicitly modern take on Anne Frank’s story, and this extends to its’ methods of storytelling and theming, more direct and less ambiguous than I anticipated. The film opens at the Anne Frank House, where a violent storm causes the glass around the original Diary to break and a blot of ink from her quill to leak onto the open pages. From this the ink floats off the page and transforms into a girl, and as the people come pouring in, she explores the museum invisible to them looking for members of the Frank family.
Where is Anne Frank is written and directed by Ari Folman, the Israeli filmmaker behind 2008’s Waltz with Bashir, still one of the most unique animated films of the twenty-first century. This movie is decidedly more family-oriented, though still doesn’t skirt around the darkness inherent to its’ chosen narrative -which is a tough needle to thread sensitively, and is probably why there are so few Anne Frank adaptations for younger audiences. Honing on her imagination and applying a kind of real magic to it as well seems like a definite recipe for disaster. And I was worried at a few points that it might dip into tastelessness with its’ fish-out-of-water antics or direct comparisons to current social issues, but I don’t think it ever went too far. In fact it ultimately stands as an apt tribute to Anne and a cogent reminder of the significance of her legacy, especially for young people today. Certainly better in that capacity than Freedom Writers.
It’s largely told from Kitty’s perspective, the story splitting time between her in Amsterdam looking for Anne while being tailed by authorities (to keep her soul alive she stole the Diary from the museum, setting off a national scandal), and her memories of Anne’s life and relationship to her during those years in hiding in the Secret Annex. Kitty is an interesting figure, as much a personification of the Diary itself as an individual whose corporeality grows the further away from the Anne Frank House she gets. At times the story of this living time capsule having to adjust to modernity takes away from where the focus of the film ought to be. Certainly a few of the action-comedy sequences in which she and her new friends evade the police feel far too typical to have a place in this story about tragedy and empathy, both in Anne’s time and ours. But Kitty is also a useful tool with which to examine Annes’ story in a whole new light and act out a thought experiment of what Anne (given what her Diary suggests of her personality and values) would make of the world today -without the sheer offensiveness of placing her in Kitty’s position in the narrative.
To that end the movie is extremely blunt. When Kitty questions Anne as to the nature of anti-Semitism, Anne relates a series of other scapegoated people across history and geography, tying the Holocaust to just about every other genocide that preceded it. In that line of thought Folman extends the thread into the modern day with surprising audacity. Regularly, the 2021 narrative hints at the European refugee crisis happening in the background of Kitty’s endeavour. Her friend Peter (likewise the name of Anne’s crush in 1944) is an immigrant, and when he takes her to the housing project that a number of refugee families are living in, the aesthetic similarity to the Secret Annex is not subtle. The buses that come to deport them also have a familiar connotation. Folman very much means to show that on some level things haven’t changed all that much, that minorities and marginalized, disenfranchised communities still experience systemic discrimination and their humanity is disregarded. It’s a bold statement to make, to openly compare any kind of modern social-political issue to the Holocaust, especially for a filmmaker from Israel. Folman though I think knows where to back off with the parallels without ever losing sight of the seriousness of his message -which he spells out in the postscript as being that Anne was not altogether unique, and that the struggle she experienced and has come to be a symbol of is still a reality for a lot of children, especially those escaping war zones or political strife. To drive the point home, he has Kitty become involved in the cause of these refugees, even weaponizing her leverage as a major fugitive.
It might seem out of character for what is essentially a projection of Anne’s consciousness, but then the movie isn’t wholly interested in the cultural image of Anne. It accounts for those (for a time) censored parts of her Diary that revealed a degree of meanness towards other children and her criticism of her parents’ marriage and the habits of the other people in the Annex. Even those passages of sexual curiosity are alluded to. And it all adds up to a portrait of Anne the Young Girl rather than Anne the martyr. It’s one of Folman’s adamant themes, frequently critiquing the ways in which Anne has been appropriated at the expense of her actual identity. But through Kitty’s relation to her, Kitty being a foot inside both that time and the modern world, Anne is brought into perspective as a person, a child. And yet her stature is not undercut in any of this, the tragedy of her story not an ounce subsided. The film even takes both its’ audience and Kitty to Bergen-Belsen, and Anne’s final days are illustrated with consummate bleakness.
On the animation front, the film is exciting. The character designs, frail though expressive, have something of a Tim Burton nature to them, but are more appealing and colourful –which fits the world, and a tone that gravitates between optimism and pessimism rather well. Anne’s design could do perhaps for a bit of a touch-up, too beholden to her likeness to allow for much versatility in her facial range –but the distinctiveness serves the movie well enough. The use of watercolour stills as markers of stories or history removed from Kitty is quite good, as is the contradictory bouncy and freewheeling style of Anne’s happier imaginings. Anne’s imagination is a vital part of her story and it allows for some sharp and ambitious visuals. At one point she fancies being inside the radio her family listens to daily, and its’ components look almost live-action. She pictures a lone resort in the Alps, a cavalry charge into Nazis among her favourite mythological, historical, and celebrity figures. But those Nazis she sees as giant faceless monoliths and the mysterious “East”, from which her family knows little but that no Jew returns from, nothing less than the pits of hell itself. She’s not altogether wrong. One of her most disturbing mental images is that of a train full of her old schoolmates ominously running towards that red horizon. It’s chilling.
In the credits, Folman dedicates the film to his parents, Holocaust survivors who arrived at Auschwitz within a week of the Frank family. That proximity perhaps accounts for his fixation on the subject of this film, one that is made with a lot of acute feeling. But then, proximity isn’t really necessary for that. As a subject, Anne Frank will always be an intensely powerful one. I visited the Anne Frank House in 2014 not honestly knowing that much about her story, and it was still one of the more deeply moving experiences of my time in Europe. Watching this film brought back some of those same emotions with a potency I hadn’t anticipated. Where is Anne Frank wants you to think about Anne not as an icon but as a child, one among millions. And it wants you to think about what she really stands for, how we have fallen short of it, and how to keep her spirit alive. The Diary is only the start.
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