With The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet confirmed his position as a master storyteller in the medium of animation. His animation is distinct and incredibly charming regardless of the appearance of his subjects, who are far from traditional family film heroes. In Chomet’s The Illusionist, that would be Tatischeff, a trickster of advanced age who finds that 1950s Europe has lost its taste for people who pull rabbits out of hats. The film shows us the empty glare of television screens in a new Television Store, and it becomes clear that the film is mourning change as a process that often does away newly classified redundancies cold bloodedly.
Tatischeff fails to pull in audiences, even when he performs after the boy band Billy Boy and the Britoons who had just played to a packed audience of screaming young girls. Eventually the old master, accompanied by his finger biting white rabbit, ends up on the coast of Scotland. Performing in a pub, his path crosses that of a young girl who sees in him… what? A guardian, a provider; a way to a better life. She does not know that his celebrity does not extend beyond the walls of the pub. There’s a sense of measured whimsy in the proceedings thus far, but when the illusionist and his new companion settle for a bit in Edinburgh, The Illusionist becomes an elegiac affair in a way that is in some way unsurprising and yet deeply moving. I dare not discuss what happens in Edinburgh for risk of spoiling it, but I can say everything happens in perfectly constructed moments, and not as banal events.
Indeed, The Illusionist is perfectly constructed animation. Chomet is a great director, and his mise-en-scene invokes a desire to watch the film over and over. He plays with the lines of window frames and uses space to help define the characters that inhabit it. There is an astonishing, brief shot towards the end of the film of an open window allowing the wind to blow open a book on a table, and the book’s shadow magnifies the action on the kitchen wall. In another moment, the young girl is in their hotel room; we are looking in from the outside, through the window, and we notice the reflection of two birds flying off in the distance. The shot works thematically and as a stunning indication that the world of The Illusionist is alive beyond simply what we see of its characters.
The Illusionist is an animated film for those who don’t like animation, an affecting story of age, expiry and commodity relations. Chomet adapted an original screenplay by the famous French comedian Jacques Tati for the film, who himself may have struggled with the possibility of being redundant in a changing world, like
Tatischeff, even to those to whom he matters most.
Tatischeff fails to pull in audiences, even when he performs after the boy band Billy Boy and the Britoons who had just played to a packed audience of screaming young girls. Eventually the old master, accompanied by his finger biting white rabbit, ends up on the coast of Scotland. Performing in a pub, his path crosses that of a young girl who sees in him… what? A guardian, a provider; a way to a better life. She does not know that his celebrity does not extend beyond the walls of the pub. There’s a sense of measured whimsy in the proceedings thus far, but when the illusionist and his new companion settle for a bit in Edinburgh, The Illusionist becomes an elegiac affair in a way that is in some way unsurprising and yet deeply moving. I dare not discuss what happens in Edinburgh for risk of spoiling it, but I can say everything happens in perfectly constructed moments, and not as banal events.
Indeed, The Illusionist is perfectly constructed animation. Chomet is a great director, and his mise-en-scene invokes a desire to watch the film over and over. He plays with the lines of window frames and uses space to help define the characters that inhabit it. There is an astonishing, brief shot towards the end of the film of an open window allowing the wind to blow open a book on a table, and the book’s shadow magnifies the action on the kitchen wall. In another moment, the young girl is in their hotel room; we are looking in from the outside, through the window, and we notice the reflection of two birds flying off in the distance. The shot works thematically and as a stunning indication that the world of The Illusionist is alive beyond simply what we see of its characters.
The Illusionist is an animated film for those who don’t like animation, an affecting story of age, expiry and commodity relations. Chomet adapted an original screenplay by the famous French comedian Jacques Tati for the film, who himself may have struggled with the possibility of being redundant in a changing world, like
Tatischeff, even to those to whom he matters most.
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