Young Marjane is no one’s idea of a heroine. A self-obsessed nine-year-old when we first meet her, she takes from the world around her only what she can use for games. Even as a teenager in the 1980s, she adapts and discards trends and styles on a daily basis, wearing a “punk” jacket while listening to Iron Maiden. She is, by any standard, an ordinary girl.

The time and place where she lives are, however, extraordinary. Marjane is the daughter of a middle-class family in Teheran, and the world she inhabits as a small girl comes crashing to the ground in 1978 with the beginnings of the Islamic Revolution that toppled the much-despised Shah but brought an even more repressive government to power.

Persepolis is an animated adaptation of the graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi that recalled her youth in a society that, by our standards and certainly by those of her own family, was on a resolute march backward.

Iran was (and in many ways still is) one of the most westernized of Middle Eastern nations. As a child of educated parents, Marjane grew up in a financially stable world. In 1978, she was just at the age when a child is anticipating the shape of his future and the world in which it will be lived. Persepolis is a diary of how those expectations were eroded—in small ways, at least to young eyes, but with no apparent limit as the revolutionary government digs in during the eight-year war with Iraq.

As an Oscar nominee for Best Animated Film, Persepolis may initially surprise some viewers for the apparent plainness of its style. Aside from bookending sequences it is in black and white (though with a greater range of grays than the books). It doesn’t aim for the three-dimensional complexity digital animation: As crafted by Satrapi and her partner Vincent Paronnaud, it is hand-drawn with simple characters that sometimes reminded me of Charles Shultz’s Peanuts.

And while the simplicity of the draftsmanship does not mean that it lacks beauty (it shows the influences of German expressionism and Italian neo-realism), the ordinariness of both the film and the main character is its point. The adult characters discuss politics just enough to set the stage, and to give us as much perspective as that of a child who doesn’t understand why her uncle is taken away to be executed, or why she has to live with a new set or seemingly arbitrary rules governing what she says and how she dresses.

Anticipating the worst, Marjane’s parents sent her away as a teenager to live with friends in Vienna. Because the story is biographical, it veers somewhat way from what (for me, at least) was the main point of interest. Marjane’s difficulties adjusting to a foreign culture, one where she is assumed to be the same as the fundamentalists from whom she escaped, are pertinent, though sometimes the recollection becomes depressing in tangential ways. (Lest I make it sound like too much of a downer, let me add that Marjane has a strong vein of self-deprecating humor, and is never afraid to show herself at her worst.)

Marjane returned to Iran in the 1990s, only to leave again for France after discovering that the home she longed for no longer existed. That explains how the film came to be produced in France, and why all of the characters speak that language instead of Farsi or German. Sony Classics, the American distributor, has announced plans for an English-dubbed version to be prepared if the initial box office seems promising (as was done with Life is Beautiful and Spirited Away). As a rule I dislike dubbed films, but in this case I think they’re making a mistake by releasing the French version. Even though the dialogue was recorded in advance so that the animation could be shaped to it, Iranians speaking French is qualitatively no different from them speaking English, and the number of young people who would be willing to see this universalizing movie far outweighs the preferences of a small handful of purists.