Rotten Tomatoes reports that 92% of critics gave the film a positive review, based upon a sample of 38, with an average score of 7.2 out of 10. According to the site's critical consensus, "An unlikely pairing of form and style, Michel Gondry's Is the Tall Man Happy? [sic] successfully gives Noam Chomsky's philosophical musings an expressive canvas with a delightfully anarchic animation style."[3]Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gave the film an average score of 76 based on 16 reviews.[4]