Superbly elegant and simple, Persepolis is based on the comic-book series by the Franco-Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi, a coming-of-age story that I can only describe as an auto-graphic-novel-ography. Satrapi has co-written and co-directed the movie version, and what a treat: funny and moving with a bracingly authentic feel, reproducing the graphic work with broad, bold strokes […]. This is one of those rare things in the cinema: a movie with an urgent new story to tell and an urgent new way of telling it.
It is the story of Marjane, a little girl growing up in pre-revolutionary Iran in the 1970s. She is the indulged and adored daughter of well-to-do secular leftists who campaign ceaselessly against the Shah, and find family members harassed and imprisoned. When the revolution arrives, Marjane’s parents and their cigarette-smoking, alcohol-drinking, idea-discussing and life-enjoying friends at first welcome it. […] But they find that the Islamic state is here to stay. And there is one group it hates most of all: women.
Marjane herself, particularly as a little girl, is a superb character, smart, vulnerable, with a cheerful, non-PC love of western trash culture. She has something of Lisa Simpson and a little more of Peanuts’ Lucy van Pelt, but with a seriousness and a single-mindedness that is all her own. She is close to her mother, closer still to her wise and worldly grandmother, whose wit and shrewdness she imbibes. Hers is a funny and deeply involving story but its sharp stabs against the women-hatred of the Iranian governing classes are enough to trigger rage. […]
As she grows into her teens and 20s, Marjane is sent abroad for a chaotic education in Europe, where she experiences the finest condescension and misogyny that the west has to offer: a complicated, bittersweet sense of exile which Satrapi has cultivated in her graphic novels and in this richly seductive and entertaining movie.
Persepolis gives us the sheer pleasure of narrative, rarely found in modern cinema or indeed fiction: a gripping story of what it is like to grow from a lonely imaginative child into an adult, and to find this internal tumult matched by geo-political upheaval.

Peter Bradshaw, “The Guardian”, 25 April 2008