I shouldn't be surprised that Persepolis strongly reminded me of Art Spigelman's seminal graphic novel, Maus. The movie is based on Marjane Satrapi's own autobiographical black-and-white graphic novel -- actually, to use "based on" seems innacurate. The animated film feels like the comic drawings coming directly to life. But the real achievement here isn't such techinical feats -- it's the movie's ability to convey its personally experienced moods in the same direct, artistically exaggerated way Maus was able to do through its pages. I've read Maus and have not read Persepolis, but there's no doubt in my mind that if Maus became a movie, it would feel tonally like this.

Specifically, it's a focused tone putting you right into the head of its storyteller, where everything about the art augments the initmacy of the teller's thoughts and emotions. The fact that you're looking at drawings reminds you you're looking at a subjective viewpoint, an interpreted memory. The black-and-white creates starkness of contrasts, reinforcing the intensity of personal feelings. It's a mode of expression so naturally suited to the graphic novel medium, and for Persepolis, the movie, its primary triumph involves being able to duplicate the experience. 

However, one shouldn't get the idea that Persepolis, jointly directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Satrapi herself, is some kind of tough, wrenching experience. It's actually quite lively and full of humor. It deals with Satrapi's childhood/youth as she remembers it, spent growing up in Iran through the Islamic Revolution. She was raised in a liberal-minded household and enjoyed many aspects of Western culture and art as a youngster. The movie offers not a constrictive narrative but a skillfully sequenced set of slices-of-life, which provides  a mix of day-to-day activities, conversations, and observations, many of which are surprisingly funny.

Naturally, when the Revolution affects the family's relatives and friends through persecution and detention, it comes as a shock to young Satrapi (voiced by Gabrielle Lopes as a child, Chiara Mastroianni as a teenager), yet she doesn't cower down but continues to be bold and outspoken. After years of this experience and the onset of the Iran-Iraq War, at her family's behest, she is sent to live in and continue her education in Vienna during her early teen years. The movie rolls along at its own pace, creating a string of little life episodes that include many milestone events in Satrapi's life, such as first love, a major breakdown, and a return to the homeland. Overall, the gamut of emotions is run -- alienation, ecstasy, courage, fear, depression, love, all eventually refined in the awkward awakening of young adulthood.

Animation is used to its best advantage here, with the drawings of people kept simple and flexible, and full license is given to the expression of historic re-enactments, dream sequences, and whimsical visual metaphors. In Satrapi's life, we find information and insights into the recent history of Iran, and femininity relative to it; we see, plainly, how feminist livelihood is natural, and how its repression is a forced state that oppressors must actively implement and maintain. The challenges of youth alone are difficult enough, but Satrapi's are seen as doubly complex simply because she is an intelligent woman who calls home a country that has, during her lifetime, become intolerant of intelligent women.

About the only problem with Persepolis is that it, well, ends -- and rather suddenly too. The story, when it wraps up, is incomplete -- it's not a spoiler to reveal that Satrapi winds up having to be away from Iran again, as the movie is presented as a flashback bookended by her waiting in an airport to leave for France -- and her life at that moment becomes freshly open-ended. But that's life, isn't it? Persepolis stands as a testament to how strong the concept of home is, even after it's become hostile; how indelible one's past is; and how constant the urge is to reconcile these two personal elements with one's present self.

(Released by Sony Pictures Classics and rated "PG-13" for mature thematic material including violent images, sexual references, language and brief drug use.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.