Persepolis co-directors Marjane Satrapi (who also created the acclaimed original graphic novel) and Vincent Paronnaud

There’s just no pleasing some ideologues. Iranian authorities have grumbled about portrayal of life after the Islamic Revolution in Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s adaptation of Satrapi’s series of autobiographical graphic novels, which were first published in France in 2000 and then in North America in 2003. Even after the film won a prize at Cannes, the country implored festivals to reject a work it decried as “Islamophobic.”

Then again, Yankee imperialists currently planning to extend their war in the Middle East to Iraq’s neighbour can’t be happy with an Oscar-nominated film that portrays ordinary Iranians as much the same as ordinary Americans. Far better for their purposes is 300’s oversized Persian ladyboy baddie, not the middle-class Satrapi family in Persepolis, who quietly struggle to cope with the new changes and restrictions imposed by the fundamentalists. As Satrapi said in an interview at Cannes last May, “This movie reminds people that this guy who you are about to throw bombs on, he’s exactly like you. He has a family, has love, has hopes — he eats, drinks, parties and laughs.”

So while Persepolis has inevitably landed in a political context, this splendid, visually inventive and often moving film — co-directed by Satrapi and Paronnaud, a fellow comic writer who first met Satrapi when they shared a studio — is primarily a personal work.

“This is not really a political film,” Satrapi says. “This is not a historical film. The politics are a background for this story. The main thing was to show how the little history is much more important than the big history. That’s because history is made by the people. If there’s a war on, people like you and me are the ones in danger — politicians can always hide.”

Satrapi and Paronnaud’s movie renders this “human aspect” with great wit and warmth even as it portrays the story’s most troubling elements, like the growing sense of cultural dislocation felt by the young Marjane, who’s more interested in ABBA and Iron Maiden than matters of religion and decorum (though leaving Iran for Europe brings its own complications, too). Their achievement is even more impressive if you consider that Persepolis is arguably the first animated feature to be successfully adapted from an adult-oriented graphic novel, though Satrapi herself dislikes that term. “I’m a cartoonist — I make comics,” she says. “The publisher calls it a graphic novel to reassure all the bourgeois, as if to say it’s ‘normal’ literature.”

The black-and-white imagery is at once stark and playful, bringing to the screen a visual sensibility that has less in common with any cinematic antecedents than with the American artists who Satrapi cites as her chief influences: Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes and Charles Burns.

One of the performers who contribute their voices (the French-language version has been thankfully preserved for the North American release), Catherine Deneuve is particularly pleased that the movie preserves both Satrapi’s authorial tone and her graphic style. “What was special to me was the mix of humour and the political point of view,” says Deneuve, who plays Satrapi’s mother, Tadji. “And when you see a drawing by Marjane, you recognize it even if you have 10 other things on the table. She has a very strong, very specific style — they’ve very simple drawings, but very sophisticated.”

While essentially faithful to Satrapi’s published works, the film offers a fully cinematic experience, something the author believes became possible only after she rejected the popular notion that comics and cinema had a natural kinship. “Just because we use words and images, there is no closeness between these media — comics are not storyboards,” she says. “The relationship you have with each medium is very different. With comics, it’s the only medium with image and text where you’re very active — you have to make up the story in between the frames. In the cinema, you are passive — you sit in the chair and we choose the rhythm, voices and movements. It was a big break for me to realize that we had to put the books away and make a real script.”

Paronnaud notes that the paring away of elements in the books also allowed the film to become “more symbolic.” As he says, “That enabled us to have more perspective on Marjane’s life story, and it became a more universal story.”

Another person who agrees is Chiara Mastroianni, who voices the part of Marjane, an appropriate piece of casting seeing as she’s Deneuve’s daughter. “Forget that it’s Iran,” she says. “I think it’s very universal what she’s talking about. This is about anyone who has had to lose a family or lose their country. This fight for freedom and to have her own opinions — that’s not just in Iran, unfortunately.”

Even though Satrapi knows that “you can never stop people from misjudging,” she hopes Persepolis will remind audiences that we’re not nearly as different as the politicians and ideologues would have us believe. No wonder they think the movie is so dangerous.