Review of The Illusionist (2009) by Kenneth L — 09 Apr 2011

A truly wonderful movie. It represents a sort of collaboration between two great French film talents, Jacques Tati and Sylvain Chomet. Tati, who died in 1982, was sort of the French equivalent to Charlie Chaplin. He always played the same character, Monsieur Hulot, a gentle bumbler who always inadvertently caused trouble. (The character inspired Rowan Atkinson's less subtle Mr. Bean). Tati wrote the screenplay for this film, but never got the chance to make it. Eventually, one of Tati's daughters gave the screenplay to Chomet, who directed the popular and surreal The Triplets of Belleville, and the result was this animated film.

The story is a simple but sweet and engaging. An old magician in the 1950s (essentially an animated version of Tati) goes around Europe playing to increasingly small and uninterested audiences. Eventually, a young Scottish girl is fascinated by his act and follows him around, and the two form a platonic father-daughter relationship. (Apparently the story reflects Tati's guilt over his failure to have a relationship with his illegitimate and unacknowledged daughter.) That's about all that really happens, but it's enough. The movie expertly strikes a delicate tone, perched between humor and sadness. The humor is of the sort that rarely makes you laugh, but frequently makes you smile. The sadness does not make you cry, but it does make you feel wistful. All of this happens with almost no dialogue. There are perhaps fifteen lines of spoken dialogue in the movie, one or two in English, a few in French, the rest in gibberish. It doesn't matter that none of it is subtitled, because you can always tell what is going on anyway.

The film is made in beautiful traditional hand-drawn animation. The detail-filled backgrounds are practically museum-worthy examples of lighting, shade, color, and so on. The characters move in exaggerated but delightful ways. (The main character in particular moves just like Tati always did in his movies.) The music is the sort of thing you would want to be the soundtrack of your life if you lived an idyllic dream-life in Paris. Although the movie is only about 80 minutes long, it allows itself to move at a relaxed pace. It's a lovely ode to the small things and small people in life. I feel like you could return to this movie at many different points in life and still enjoy it.