Noam Chomsky, left, and Michel Gondry in Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (Sundance Selects)

During the screening of Michel Gondry’s latest film, Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? (more on that title in a moment), I couldn’t help but take some notes. But it wasn’t anything exactly cohesive. Quite simply, I thought there was a possibility that some of the material that Gondry discusses with the now-85-year-old Noam Chomsky, iconic and influential writer in the field of linguistics, would fly over my head. So in my notepad I see little statements like “What is a tree?” “A rock?” “How do we see?” And “Evolution has Mutations.” “Psychic Continuity.”

Now reading over some of these statements, I still know what they mean. To Chomsky’s credit, he’s not the sort of intellectual who says things in a way that you can’t understand. He explains his points clearly, and what’s sort of funny, a couple of times Gondry admits he isn’t sure if what he means to ask Mr. Chomsky is going to go over his head too.

But what is Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?, and why is it unique among this director’s body of work? What Gondry has done here is to animate his conversations with Chomsky about a variety of subjects, some personal (about Chomsky’s upbringing in Philadelphia, his early academic achievements), and some of the nitty-gritty of how to see the world. Not all of the film is animated; there are little snippets here and there where Gondry shoots Chomsky on a 16-mm Bolex camera (he considered shooting on a digital camera, but loved the loud whirring sound this camera makes), and Chomsky (and sometimes the director) appears within a box that’s meant to be a window or another picture frame within the rest of the mise-en-scene.

It’s remarkable all the same. Gondry animates it all by himself, and the film is drawn usually crudely, with a sense of humor that creeps up on you. There’s a simple charm to everything he puts down. Gondry also makes it a further personal project by showing himself in the endless task of hand drawing frame-by-frame the animation (he narrates in a heavy French accent). And ultimately his goal is to translate through the medium of cinema a lot of what Chomsky is talking about. When he explains something, Gondry puts it up on the screen, whether it’s Chomsky in a house reading a book in Hebrew with his father in the 1930s or discussing something called “Cognitive Endowment,” which refers to, as far as I can tell, how we perceive things and how they shape us. So, in other words, a tree IS a tree… or is it?

It’s not just about linguistics, but I imagine if one is familiar with Chomsky’s theories and concepts he’s developed over the decades—frankly, I am not—it’s a good primer for all that. The triumph of the film, minor as it may seem compared to Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or The Science of Sleep, is that it turns really heady concepts into a heady movie with some bizarre animation. As in his other works, a child-like sensibility elevates the material. We can maybe absorb a lot of Chomsky’s concepts in print. In film, they take on another role—the movie almost hearkens to Gondry’s work in music videos, where he could process through his own delightfully warped viewpoint the source material, presenting it as something completely fresh yet still reconstructing what the original artist was trying to do.

The title of the film gets addressed by the director, as what to make of the word “Is.” As a good documentarian, Gondry is adept at steering a conversation forward, finding points that work and, in a rarity, acknowledging when he should move on to something else for the audience.

His film takes you to a level where you have to try and rethink what you know about language—where you place a word determines its meaning, how the structure of words impacts our thought process, and how one interruption changes the meaning (as Gondry shows with tricky jump-cut editing of the recitation of the film’s title). And in doing so, it is Chomsky’s triumph as well.