December 25th, 2007 will witness the limited release of what is certainly one of the most unusual films to hit American cinemas this year. As co-directed by Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi, and issued on this side of the Atlantic by Sony Pictures Classics, Persepolis is a French/U.S./Iranian co-production, animated and in black-and-white, on the theme of political dissidence. If that alone doesn’t indicate the film’s intended audience, let me be clearer: we’ve seen a number of non-anime films in the past several years that break the mold on the western stereotype of “animation designed predominantly for children” - from the whimsical avant-garde irreverence of Sylvain Chomet’s The Triplets of Belleville (2003), to the rotoscoping of Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2006) - but this one, above all others, will almost certainly force incredulous adult audiences into a new mindset regarding non-live action material. (Not that Persepolis stands any chance of a mainstream release - it looks far too idiosyncratic for that).

As adapted from Satrapi’s popular autobiographical graphic novel, the film dramatizes the tale of a young Iranian girl persecuted for vocalizing her iconoclastic beliefs during the Iranian revolution. The simplistic quality of the animation gives it a stark, foreboding quality and a lyrical asceticism that makes the trailer supremely haunting.

Now comes the sticky part. Evidently two versions of this film exist - an original French-language version sporting the vocal talents of such European superstars as Catherine Deneuve and Danielle Darrieux (the grand dame of French Cinema, who just celebrated her 90th birthday), and a re-looped version with the said actresses reprising their roles in English, plus the added voices of Sean Penn, Iggy Pop and Gena Rowlands. It remains to be seen if Sony will release two versions in the U.S., one with a French language audio track and English subtitles, but frankly, I’m unsure what the point is of avoiding subtitles. After all, it isn’t as if the crowd that would frequent this film is unaccustomed to reading subtitles, and the use of foreign language looks as if it may add to the film’s effect by imbuing it with an alien quality.

At least Sony had the wisdom and intelligence to pick this up - and because it constitutes France’s official selection for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2008, it may clock in as one of the rare animated contenders for that Oscar in the history of the Academy.