“Anomalisa,” written by Charlie Kaufman (who directed with Duke Johnson), provides a profoundly unsettling experience. As purposefully inert as it is painstakingly animated, the movie simultaneously suggests a vast collective enterprise and a sense of anguished solitude. The tone is not quite comic and not exactly tragic. In her review, Manohla Dargis of The Times called it “a horror movie about the agonizing, banal surrealism of everyday life.”

A successful author of self-help books, Michael (David Thewlis), flies from Los Angeles to Cincinnati to give a motivational speech — an interesting gig for a depressed middle-aged guy. Staying at a business hotel, he contacts an old lover for a brief, disastrous encounter and stumbles into a one-night stand with Lisa, an awkward, self-deprecating young woman who is in town for his appearance and also a guest at the hotel. Michael and Lisa are individuated puppets. Everyone else — including the characters from the 1936 screwball comedy “My Man Godfrey,” seen briefly on Michael’s hotel room TV — has more or less the same face and speaks with the voice of Tom Noonan.

“Anomalisa” continually calls attention to its paradoxical nature. “What is it to be human?” Michael wonders during a public presentation that is a baby step from a complete nervous breakdown. “What is it to be alive?” Several times, the film evokes Japanese bunraku puppet theater while subtly emphasizing the expressive power of the human voice. (It has its origins as a sort of live radio play written for Mr. Kaufman’s Theater of the Ear.) The impersonal settings — airports, hotel rooms, cocktail lounges — are so lovingly miniaturized as to be a form of Pop Art. For all its artifice, “Anomalisa” features one of the most tender and weirdly authentic portrayals of sexual intimacy in the history of Hollywood movies.

Paramount’s dual Blu-ray/DVD release includes three Blu-ray documentaries on the making of the film; one is wholly devoted to the sex scene, which not only gives the movie its heart and soul but also new meaning to the biblical phrase “labor of love.”

NEWLY RELEASED

BUSTER KEATON: THE SHORTS COLLECTION 1917-1923 All of Mr. Keaton’s surviving silent shorts are restored and reissued in a new five-disc edition. Thirteen are apprentice works made with Fatty Arbuckle; 19 are directed by the master. It’s essential cinema by any standard, still fresh and endlessly rewarding. Available on Blu-ray and DVD. (Kino Classics)

A CHILD IS WAITING Stanley Kramer hired John Cassavetes to direct a drama exposing the condition of children institutionalized for mental disabilities. Reissued on Blu-ray, the 1963 movie has a strong documentary subtext, with Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland appearing along with child patients from the Pacific State Hospital in Pomona, Calif. (Kino Lorber)