YMMV / Anomalisa

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Infatuation is fleeting. The high you get from meeting someone new and the excitement you feel when starting a potential relationship are not a solid enough foundation for it to work long-term, and certainly not enough to make spur-of-the-moment, life-altering decisions. It takes much more time and investment.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Did Michael really see anything special in Lisa? Would he have still noticed her without his Fregoli Delusion? Or ironically enough, would she have been just another face in the crowd?
  • There is also the theory that Lisa isn't real and that Michael was really with the sex doll. Hints include both having similar scars on their head in size, shape and location. Also, the doll is absent from the hotel room when Michael and Lisa are together. In addition, the semen coming out of its mouth in the end implies that it was...recently used given it's an old animatronic.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Michael books a smoking room at his hotel. The film takes place in 2005, and Ohio did not ban smoking indoors until 2006.
• Award Snub: While many agree that Inside Out was very much an award deserving film, others argue that this should have beaten it for the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for pushing the envelope on animation as a medium.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Michael gives his son the sex animatronic he bought early in the film and his wife remarks that it looks like semen is coming out of it.
• Dancing Bear: It's a melancholy, downbeat drama for adults, acted out entirely by stop-motion puppets. And it's best known for...being a melancholy, downbeat drama for adults, acted out entirely by stop-motion puppets.
• Narm Charm: You'd think seeing stop motion characters having sex would be rather silly, and it's definitely a little awkward-looking, but it's still so touching and believable that many critics declared it the most emotional sex scene of any movie that year. It helps that the animator of the scene tried as hard as he could to make it realistic enough to work.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The very believable depiction of Fregoli delusion from Michael's perspective. Imagining everyone with the exact same face and voice is as terrifying as it sounds.
  • The ending credits song is beautiful yet haunting. Tom Noonan provides the vocals, and by the end the song devolves into a cacophony of Tom Noonan voices conversing among themselves, which is likely meant to show what Michael hears every day of his life.
• Out of the Ghetto: The film made Oscar history by being the first R-rated film to be nominated for Best Animated Feature, while to this day the nominations still suffer from this trope with very few exceptions. Of course, the fact that it lost to the decisively more family-friendly and conventional Inside Out, was proof to some that the trope is still very much in effect, at least in the eyes of the Academy.
• Special Effects Failure: Deliberately kept in. The joints separating the upper and lower halves of the faces, which would normally be removed in post by CGI, are visible. And at one point, Michael's face falls off.
• Squick: At one point, we see Michael's genitals after a shower. Yes, really.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The film's hyper realistic production design and characters. Some are impressed. Others are disturbed.
• The Woobie: Michael is practically screaming for someone to hug him during his breakdown.

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