"Persepolis" is essentially a coming-of-age story, though that description feels a little reductive for a movie as special
as this one. It is the memoir of Marjane Strapi, an Iranian woman who was born in 1969 and underwent the travails of adolescence at the same time that her country was struggling through an astonishing revolution. Her perspective is not unique -- obviously there were plenty of little girls in Iran in the late '70s -- but she is the only one so far to write a graphic novel based on her experiences and subsequently turn it into an animated film. That's right, "Persepolis" is a cartoon, mostly in black-and-white, almost entirely in French (Satrapi lives in France now), and framed around the Iranian Revolution. It is named for the ancient ceremonial capital of Persia, a detail that is not mentioned in the film itself. I don't think a cartoon has been this hard to market since "Fritz the Cat." We begin in Tehran in 1978, where young Marji (voice of Gabrielle Lopes) lives with her parents. She's a precocious, adventurous tyke, fond of Bruce Lee and Adidas and looking forward to shaving her legs one day. The stories that surround her of political prisoners and government torture are filtered humorously through her naive young eyes.
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