On film · a member's film · 2019
Anima
Fifteen minutes on Netflix of Thom Yorke chasing a stranger's lost lunchbox across Prague, made for his record of the same name.
2018
unfinished business
Anima began on Suspiria. Thom Yorke wrote the score for Luca Guadagnino's film in 2018 and Damien Jalet made its dances, and the two of them felt they had more to do together. In December Yorke emailed Jalet to ask him to choreograph some of the new songs, and described what he could see: workers whose bodies had stopped working, pushed along by a force nobody could see. Paul Thomas Anderson, who had directed the “Daydreaming” video for Radiohead in 2016, came in as what he called the third wheel.
It's all Thom. So much of this stuff is directly from Thom's brain.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Variety, June 2019
Most of the planning was done over Skype. Jalet says they were never all in one room until the day they started shooting.
2019
a week in May
They shot in May 2019, in about a week, in Prague's streets and metro and in a museum at Les Baux-de-Provence where they did what Anderson called the cave work. Darius Khondji was the cinematographer. Anderson's instruction on set, he said, was more Buster Keaton.
The film is a silent comedy with three of Yorke's songs for a soundtrack. On a metro at dawn full of workers in matching overalls, nodding off, Yorke catches the eye of a woman, played by Dajana Roncione. She gets off and leaves her lunchbox behind. He goes after her up the escalator, gets stuck at the barriers, and has to cross a tilting floor, which was a ten-square-metre platform at 34 degrees with the camera tilted to match so the slope disappears. Jalet says Yorke learned that sequence in two hours. The last song, “Dawn Chorus”, finds the two of them on a tram above ground. Roncione was Yorke's partner, and they married in Sicily the following year.
2019–2020
one night in IMAX
Yorke announced the record and the film together on 20 June 2019. On 26 June about 40 IMAX cinemas around the world showed Anima free, and on 27 June it went up on Netflix the same day the record came out. Stephen Thompson of NPR found it warm and unusually revealing of Yorke, who for once was playing. Sam Adams in Slate said that with a bowler hat on him, a 1920s audience would have loved it.
Anima is on Netflix and nowhere else. It was nominated for best music film at the Grammys in January 2020, and lost to Beyoncé's Homecoming.
the teaser
Anima, the teaser· Netflixwatch on youtube →
sources8
- Chris Willman, “Paul Thomas Anderson on directing Thom Yorke for 'Anima'”, Variety, 26 June 2019, variety.com (how it began, the third wheel, Anderson's quote, the museum, Buster Keaton, the IMAX screenings)
- Günseli Yalcinkaya, “Choreographer Damien Jalet on the dystopian world of Thom Yorke's ANIMA”, Dazed, 15 July 2019, dazeddigital.com (Yorke's email in December, his brief, Skype, a week's shooting, the tilted platform, two hours)
- Damien Jalet, “ANIMA”, damienjalet.com (the credits, Prague and Les Baux)
- Winston Cook-Wilson, Spin, 27 June 2019, spinmagazine.com (the three songs, filmed in May, released on Netflix with the record)
- Stephen Thompson, All Songs Considered, NPR, 27 June 2019, npr.org (the story of the film, the verdict)
- Sam Adams, Slate, 27 June 2019, slate.com (the lunchbox, the silent comedy)
- Recording Academy, “2020 Grammy Awards: complete winners and nominations list”, grammy.com (the nomination and the winner)
- Netflix, Anima, netflix.com (still streaming in October 2026)