Production notes

The film is presented in the black-and-white style of the original graphic novels. Satrapi explains in a bonus feature on the DVD that this was so that the place and the characters would not look like foreigners in a foreign country but simply people in a country to show how easily a country can become like Iran. The present-day scenes are shown in color, while sections of the historic narrative resemble a shadow theater show. The design was created by art director and executive producer Marc Jousset. The animation is credited to the Perseprod studio and was created by two specialized studios, Je Suis Bien Content and Pumpkin 3D.

Written and directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, the film was produced by 20 animators. Initially opposed to producing an animated film due to the high level of difficulty, producers Marc-Antoine Robert and Xavier Regault gave protagonist Satrapi various options to avoid animation. Robert said: "I know the new generation of French comic book artists quite well, and I'm afraid of Marjane's. I offered to write an original script for her, because I didn't want to work on an animated movie at all! ... I knew how complicated it was." In the end, the producers followed Satrapi's wishes and focused on interpreting her life story as depicted in her novel Persepolis. "With live-action, it would have turned into a story of people living in a distant land who don't look like us," Satrapi said. "At best, it would have been an exotic story, and at worst, a 'third-world' story." The animation team worked alongside Satrapi to gain a detailed understanding of the types of graphic images she deemed necessary for accuracy. Following her guidelines, the animators, such as Marc Jousset, commented on their use of the "traditional animation techniques" Satrapi requested to keep the drawings simple and avoid the "more high-tech techniques" that "would look dated". Satrapi's vision, according to Jousset, involved a lot of focus on the characters' natural, humane physical imperfections. During their initial stages of production, the animation team attempted to use 2D image techniques "on pen tablets", but were immediately unsatisfied with the product due to the lack of definition, Jousset has said. Applying traditional techniques as simple as paper and ink to the production allowed Satrapi to use methods she was familiar with. As a result, Satrapi crafted a depiction she recognized as her own work, and thus her own story. Satrapi, along with the director and animation team, deliberately chose black and white as the film's dominant colors to continue on the path of traditional animation techniques. Despite its simplicity, members of the animation team such as Jousset discussed how black and white makes imperfections more obvious: "Using only black and white in an animation movie requires a great deal of discipline. From a technical point of view, you can't make any mistakes ... it shows up straight away on the large screen". In addition to color display, the animation team worked especially hard on techniques that mimicked the styles of Japanese comics, known as manga, and translating them into their own craft of "a specific style, both realistic and mature. No bluffing, no tricks, nothing overcooked". According to Jousset, "Marjane had quite an unusual way of working ... Marjane insisted on being filmed playing out all the scenes ... it was a great source of information for the animators, giving them an accurate approach to how they should work". With this in mind, the animators commented on the immense hardships they faced when creating each image of "1,200 shots" through Satrapi's perspective because even though "Marjane's drawings looked very simple and graphic ... they're very difficult to work on because there are so few identifying marks. Realistic drawings require outstanding accuracy". Despite the difficulties in working with animation, Satrapi's determination to make the film motivated the animators to finish each graphic image with full accuracy. Following alongside a more traditional style of graphic imagery was not only difficult in terms of drawing, but also in terms of locating a team to draw the images since traditional animators "hardly exist in France anymore". With a group of more than 100 people, though, animator Pascal Chevé confirmed the variety of style each team member brought to the table: "An animator will be more focused on trying to make the character move in the right way. Assistant animators will then put the final touches to the drawings to make sure they're true to the original. Then the 'trace' team comes in, and they work on each drawing with ... a felt pen, to ensure that they are consistent with the line that runs throughout the movie". Although it was hard to craft realistic cartoon drawings, Jousset said the biggest challenge was staying on schedule and within budget of "6 million Euros, which is reasonable for a 2D movie made in France", but that "I think the culmination of the fact that it was a true story, that the main character worked with you, that an animated movie dealt with a current issue and that it was intended for adults was tremendously exciting for the team".

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 96%, based on 163 reviews, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Persepolis is an emotionally powerful, dramatically enthralling autobiographical gem, and the film's simple black-and-white images are effective and bold." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 90 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four, writing that although its black and white animation "may sound Spartan", it is "surprisingly involving" and that Satrapi's story is told "caringly, lovingly and with great style". He added, "while so many films about coming of age involve manufactured dilemmas, here is one about a woman who indeed does come of age, and magnificently." A. O. Scott, reviewing for The New York Times, was fascinated by the film and said, "Persepolis, austere as it may look, is full of warmth and surprise, alive with humor and a fierce independence of spirit". Time's Richard Corliss ranked the film sixth on his list of the "Top 10 Movies" of 2007, calling it "a coming-of-age tale that manages to be both harrowing and exuberant". The film was ranked number 58 on Empire's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010. In 2024, Looper ranked it 30th on its list of the "50 Best PG-13 Movies of All Time", writing: "Adapting a graphic novel into a feature film can be a bittersweet experience, as often these properties are translated into live-action films that erase the distinctive hand-drawn artwork of their source material. Thankfully, author Marjane Satrapi adapts her work Persepolis into a film of the same name through hand-drawn animation, which maintains the wonderfully idiosyncratic imagery of her original work."

The film drew complaints from the Iranian government. Even before its debut at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, the government-connected Iran Farabi Foundation sent a letter to the French embassy in Tehran reading, "This year the Cannes Film Festival, in an unconventional and unsuitable act, has chosen a movie about Iran that has presented an unrealistic face of the achievements and results of the glorious Islamic Revolution in some of its parts." Despite such objections, the Iranian cultural authorities relented in February 2008 and allowed limited screenings of the film in Tehran, albeit with six scenes censored due to sexual content. In June 2007, the film was dropped from the lineup of the Bangkok International Film Festival. Festival director Chattan Kunjara na Ayudhya said, "I was invited by the Iranian embassy to discuss the matter and we both came to mutual agreement that it would be beneficial to both countries if the film was not shown" and "It is a good movie in artistic terms, but we have to consider other issues that might arise here." Persepolis was initially banned in Lebanon after some clerics found it "offensive to Iran and Islam." The ban was later revoked after an outcry in Lebanese intellectual and political circles.

On 7 October 2011, the film was shown on the Tunisian private television station Nessma. The following day, a demonstration formed and marched on the station. The main Islamic party in Tunisia, Ennahda, condemned the demonstration. Nabil Karoui, the owner of Nessma TV, faced trial in Tunis on charges of "violating sacred values" and "disturbing the public order." He was found guilty and ordered to pay a fine of 2,400 dinars ($1,700; £1,000), a much more lenient punishment than predicted. Amnesty International said that criminal proceedings against Karoui are an affront to freedom of expression.