Where Is Anne Frank

Anne Frank addressed her diary as “Dear Kitty,” and in this glossy reflection on Frank’s cultural legacy, a doe-eyed personification of Kitty magically appears in the Anne Frank House Museum during a lightning storm. She’s confused as to the interlopers poking around Anne’s belongings and concerned for Anne’s whereabouts—Kitty only exists insofar as Anne wrote to her, and her knowledge ends when Anne stopped writing. She ventures out, ghostlike, into greater Amsterdam, witnessing sites and institutions named after the famous diarist, while simultaneously learning of Anne’s horrific fate. In her search, she encounters a young street punk, Peter, who enlightens her to the unjust plight of immigrant populations whom European governments regard as “other” in the modern day. A shallower follow-up to Folman’s incisive graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s Diary, this new project to connect Frank’s experience to society’s collective memory of historical atrocities can be compelling—surreal, mythic images of nightmarish Nazi soldiers and Bergen Belsen as a Cerberus-guarded underworld are affectingly chilling—but the magical-Kitty framing device is employed with too much gimmick to create the impact it intends.