WHERE IS ANNE FRANK. Intriguing Representation of Wartime

Nazi troops march through the streets of Amsterdam. Even up close, they do not look human. Black robes and the posture of Darth Vader, with faces hidden behind Michael Myers-style white masks. Teenage Anne Frank, together with her sister and parents, hides in secret rooms within a canal house. The war is gaining momentum; deportations, expropriations, and roundups are an everyday reality. At night, through the skylight, one can see planes exchanging gunfire. This is not how the titular heroine imagined stepping into adulthood: banned from cinemas, shops, and theaters, living in hiding, watching friends suddenly disappear, and feeling utterly alone. It is precisely this last feeling that drives her to keep a diary, addressed to an imaginary friend, Kitty.

Ari Folman’s animation (Waltz with Bashir, The Congress) is narratively structured across several intertwined and complementary levels. In the contemporary, metaphysical storyline, we follow Kitty, who magically emerges from Anne’s museum diary. She seeks an answer to the question posed in the film’s title. She must confront tragic news from the past as well as the realities of a modern 21st-century city. The retrospective segment of Where is Anne Frank goes back to the 1940s, recounting the wartime fate of the Frank family. Each passing day brings less food, the political threat becomes more palpable, and the claustrophobic hideout grows stiflingly tight.

The third structural axis of Folman’s film comprises visions, flights of imagination, memories, and fantastical dreams. Here, the free-spirited Anne embraces her adored Clark Gable. She dreams of a triumphant battle against the German army. On her side are not only Hollywood stars but also griffins and unicorns. When Anne faces her darkest moments, her imagination kicks into overdrive. The more paralyzing the fear, the stronger her response. Many images and sequences in Where is Anne Frank linger in the memory: trains headed to hell, camp guards towering like the Statue of Liberty, close-ups of fiercely barking dogs. Folman consistently maintains a sense of entrapment, helplessness, and being watched.

Where is Anne Frank offers an intriguing visual representation of wartime, but on the textual level, it remains on familiar territory. Lines outside shops, groups listening to radio updates on Allied actions, shattered store windows—here, Folman does not seek less conventional angles, solutions, or compositions. He relies on a well-established, heavily symbolic universe. The animated style, as always, lends the story a degree of abstraction. Yet Folman often remains theatrically derivative and narratively conservative. The gravity of the events certainly imposes a specific language and tone, but it feels as though the director passes alongside the viewer rather than striving to capture their attention.

Kitty’s search for Anne is meant to intersect with and reflect the diary author’s fate. The army no longer hauls people to camps in cattle cars. Today, the police brutally drag homeless people off the streets and hold them in stations. Systemic pressure on immigrants forces them to hide in unheated, post-industrial warehouses. Without work, without access to food or water, without identity, without any prospects for the future.

Ari Folman constructs an analogy—perhaps too clear—between then and now. The same phenomena and the same offenses recur. In his view, some progress has been made: things are better, more ordinary, safer. Yet this remains far too little, and a tremendous amount of work lies ahead. This work is not about building more Anna Frank schools, hospitals, theaters, bridges, or libraries. In these merely symbolic gestures, Folman argues, the humanitarian message of her diaries is absent.