This powerful but flawed animation depicts the brilliant German Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon, creator of a remarkable series of quasi-autobiographical gouaches entitled Life? or Theatre?, painted in the period of her exile in Vichy France from 1941 to 1943, before she was taken to Auschwitz and there murdered at the age of 26; the paintings themselves are now held in Amsterdam’s Jewish Museum. The movie is part of a vital tradition of representing the Holocaust through powerful animated images, stemming back to Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. Screenwriters Erik Rutherford and David Bezmozgis have worked from the narrative suggested by...