Film Review - Where Is Anne Frank (2021)

It’s a title that poses more than one question. If, like this writer, you like your punctuation accurate, you’ll be wondering why it doesn’t have a question mark. But, once you’ve seen Where Is Anne Frank, you’ll be left with the thought in the back of your mind that the order of the words is the real issue – one that would be closer to the spirit of the film and its central characters.

Anne Frank‘s story is one of the most widely known of the many that emerged from the Second World War. Between 1942 and 1944, the teenage girl and her family lived in a secret apartment in the annex of her father’s factory to avoid transportation to the Nazi concentration camps. To pass the time during those tense, near-silent days, Anne wrote a diary, describing her experiences, thoughts and feelings, until the day came when they, and the others living with them, were discovered and taken away. Anne herself died in Bergen-Belsen the following year, at the age of sixteen. Her diary survived and today the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam attracts over a million visitors from around the world every year.

The museum and the diary vividly re-create life under occupation, one that is startlingly relevant some eighty years later. What’s perhaps less known is that Anne addressed her diary to an imaginary friend, Kitty, and it’s she rather than Anne at the centre of this heartfelt animation. The director of Waltz With Bashir (2008) takes a less satirical view of events than in his animation about the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and instead creates a fantasy around the character of Kitty, moving backwards and forwards from her “life” with Anne in the confines of both the apartment and the pages of her diary to present day Amsterdam, where she sees the public version of Anne’s legacy but struggles to find something deeper and more relevant to the spirit of her friend and creator. Not that Anne ever envisaged being remembered in any way – her diary was private, after all – but the world seems to have forgotten the real meaning behind her memoirs.

Her name is everywhere – on the schools, library, theatre, just about any public, high profile building you can think of – but for the determined Kitty (voiced by Ruby Stokes), it feels like lip service and the visitors who queue outside the Anne Frank House are even less respectful once they step through the doors. She finds Anne’s true spirit elsewhere, among the community of refugees living in ships’ containers smothered with graffiti and it’s here where the film’s true heart lies. Folman takes his time getting to this point and, in the context of the 21^st century world, the resolution of this part of the story is dangerously close to naïve, but its heart is most definitely in the right place and the tone is very much in keeping with the film’s emotional stance.

Folman sticks with lovingly hand drawn animation: it’s beautifully detailed and at times has a real vibrancy, especially in Kitty’s eyes. In both her ghostly and physical forms, she embodies Anne’s spirit – courage, defiance, honesty – and those of the 40s movie stars whose pictures adorned the bedroom wall. The animation also comes with an endearing simplicity, especially in the way Kitty is conjured up out of the words on the diary’s pages. It’s where she started and where she belongs in this delicate and compassionate re-imagining of both history and the present day.