Writer-Director Tatia Rosenthal’s "$9.99," a work of stop-motion animation using silicone figures, took her ten years to make and it was well worth the wait. Like the stories by Etgar Keret that she worked from (she co-wrote the screenplay with him), Rosenthal’s vision is simultaneously very magical and very human. The ideas and images are somehow more real than they would be if actors were bringing them to life on screen.

That the audience is constantly reminded of the characters' constructed nature, that they were created to look human but not be (the brush strokes on their faces are visible and their skin coloring is a mixture of conventional pinks and reds mixed with an unexpected blue or green in an attempt to capture the strange quality of Lucian Freud’s paintings), somehow reminds us of the ambiguity of our own humanity.  In spite of their silicone bodies, the characters (voiced by Anthony LaPaglia and Geoffrey Rush, among others) are ugly and beautiful, luminous and muted, complex and simple, happy and profoundly sad, just as we are.  

Sure, Rosenthal provides a glimpse into the lives and minds of these characters living in the same building; but she also invents an imagined world with its own theory of life for us to dwell in for the 78 minutes we spend at the cinema, and longer.  Keret refers to the merging of his and Rosenthal’s vision as a sort of "agnostic-Hasidic tale."  Indeed, their shared art amounts to a kind of love song to longing for something more in life, and its inevitable counterpart, the fear that it doesn't exist.  If this sounds like a challenging notion, that’s because it is, but this struggle between faith and doubt is what makes us human.

"$9.99" works so well because Rosenthal manages to balance what initially appear to be contradictory notions: the very mature movie made in what is often considered a children’s medium, the magic and the realism, the hope and the despair.  I had a reaction to this film that I have rarely experienced in the couple years I've been writing about movies for a living; I left the theater feeling that I had just witnessed the work of a very special mind and that I would be forever different for having seen it.

Have a look at the trailer, but I warn you that you'll be smitten.