As Persepolis proves, for something like the billionth time, the animation medium is one capable of encompassing more than fairy tales and talking animal comedies. This film, based on a popular graphic novel, depicts one girl’s struggles in revolutionary Iran as the western friendly Shah is replaced with Islamic fundamentalists, making life much more difficult if you’re of the female persuasion. The 2-D, predominately black and white film is a powerful work that doesn’t need a lot of bells and whistles to gets its point across. It’s elegant, and beautiful, and best of all – autobiographical, with French subtitles.

The story is about Marji (Chiara Mastroianni), who begins the film as a rambunctious 10 year old. The year is 1979 and the revolution soon begins, ushering in the hopes of better times ahead for the Iranian people. But as the years pass, this turns out to not be the case and if anything, conditions get worse for the people. Marji, now a teenager begins to speak out about the new order, so much so that her parents, out of fear for her safety, send her to school in Vienna. But in Austria, Marji finds it difficult to adjust and as a result becomes an outsider herself because she’s Iranian. All this is just the beginning of Marji’s struggle to reconcile her search for self with the inner turmoil at home, in Tehran.

Touching without being sentimental and strongly worded without being political, Persepoliscombines several different levels of storytelling into one highly dense package. It’s got great humour in the way that co-screenwriters and co-directors Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud approaches Marji’s impudent childhood, and it tracks in great sadness when Marji, as a young adult, fends for herself on the streets of Vienna, both trapped by and insulated in her cultural identity. But there’s a tremendous universality to Marji’s story: the fascination with alien cultures, the disenfranchisement from one’s own culture and the desperate struggle to find yourself in world that desperately wants you to be easy to define.

The animation style is clean and simple, deceptively so considering the complex feelings and emotions involved in the film’s story. It’s the perfect companion to the two dual Persepolisgraphic novels, from which the film is based and was also created by Satrapi, capturing the look of the book’s art work perfectly while adding the fluidity of motion. It’s easily charming and engrossing no matter how far removed you think you are from the events within it. Persepolis was nominated for the Academy Award for best animated feature this past March. And while it lost to Ratatouille, which doesn’t really disappoint me, is was certainly deserving of such an accolade for pushing the medium in new directions and for highlighting the true story of a barely understood culture.