The Illusionist (Two-Disc Blu-ray/DVD Combo) (2010)

The latest animated film by Sylvain Chomet is based on a script by the late Jacques Tati, who intended the film to be live-action but ended up never bringing the film to fruition. Tati died in 1982 and the script was passed to Chomet by Tati's daughter Sophie Tatischeff, who died before Chomet's debut feature-length, animated film The Triplets of Belleville was released. Since The Illusionist debuted it has been criticized by family members of Tati for straying from his original vision, as well as his original intention for writing the script in the first place. Since Tati is credited with writing the original script and Chomet is credited with adapting it, it is unknown how significantly Chomet altered the original script. Whether Chomet strayed from Tati's script or not becomes irrelevant as we can't judge a film based on what it could've been but for what it is. The fact is, the film exists in its current form and here it is:

The film begins in Paris, 1959 with Tatischeff, the illusionist of the title, performing his act for anyone who will watch on any stage he can find. While not very successful Tatischeff is an effective illusionist, whose only problem seems to be his unruly rabbit. Constantly searching for a stage to perform on, Tatischeff travels to Scotland and meets a young woman named Alice who believes that his illusions are really magic. Following Tatischeff to Edinburgh, Alice takes care of the house while he goes around performing his act. Alice's love for his tricks and his unwillingness to admit to Alice that what he does is all illusion causes Tatischeff to slowly become bankrupt in his attempts to always have gifts on hand to impress the girl with.

Tatischeff is animated to look like Jacques Tati and Tati's persona is conveyed through his animated counterpart quite well. Those familiar with Tati should appreciate this animated version, as well as the scene where Tatischeff wanders into a theatre playing Mon Oncle. The animation in The Illusionist is much more straight-forward than The Triplets of Belleville, but retains a similar look and feel that identifies Chomet as the maker. Like that film, there is very little dialogue and when there is it's usually brief, mumbled, and nearly inaudible. Finally, just as Bruno the dog was one of the most amusing characters in The Triplets of Belleville simply by being a dog, so is the rabbit in The Illusionist simply by being a rabbit.

Chomet is one of the few animated filmmakers able to use their animation so poetically and while Tati was an immensely talented filmmaker who was more than capable of putting his vision onscreen, this film seems very well-suited for Chomet's animated interpretation. While this film may not be a perfect representation of Tati's vision or intent, it is a respectful tribute to both the man and his style. While I admittedly haven't re-visited Tati's films in sometime, Chomet stays true to his style with his use of wide shots, keeping his distance from Tatischeff in much the same way Tati kept his distance from his Monsieur Hulot. Chomet's film may not convey exactly what Tati wished it to, but the fanciful, melancholy it conveys is quite effective.

Through animation, Chomet is able to capture and convey more emotion than his medium should allow. There are directors who would struggle to capture this emotion with a live-action adaptation of Tati's script and actors who would struggle to convey as much meaning with a lengthy monologue that Chomet effortlessly conveys with sparse dialogue. It's a beautiful film to behold, has a lovely musical score, and happens to be one of the most poignant films of 2010.

The Illusionist is a touching, at times depressing, but always effective film that succeeds at capturing the spirit of Tati where it may have failed to capture the message. Chomet continues doing great things in animation and this is another masterful example that truly deserves to be called one of the best films, animated or otherwise, of 2010. Whether you're a fan of Tati, Chomet, or you're new to the films of both, you owe it to yourself to see this film. It's a masterpiece and a wonderful addition to Tati's legacy.

GRADE: A

The Illusionist is a beautifully-rendered animated story about a French stage magician, Tatischeff, and his relationship with a young Scottish girl named Alice, at a time when his kind of entertainment is being displaced by the onset of television and rock-and-roll.

Stylistically, The Illusionist will be immediately familiar to fans of Chomet's best-known film, The Triplets of Belleville. The animation is gorgeously detailed, the characters unique, and the story presented with virtually no dialogue, relying on an occasional comprehensible word or two emerging from deliberately garbled bursts of psuedo-language, French or Scottish-English depending on the setting.

Storywise though, The Illusionist is distinctly different from Triplets. While Triplets was imbued with a manic glee, The Illusionist is instead tinged throughout with a mix of sweetness and sadness. The film begins with Tatischeff's stage magician having to deal with a changing world in which his style of entertainment is increasingly less in demand. This is brought painfully home early on when he ventures to the UK for a gig, only to find his act's slot on stage pushed back again and again by a rock-and-roll band's repeated encores for an audience of screaming teenage girls, forcing the magician to go through his pre-act preparations repeatedly. And when the band finally leaves the stage and Tatischeff gets his chance to go on, it is only to find that the bulk of the audience has already departed, leaving only a solitary grandmother and grandson for him to perform for. The scene is at once absurdly comic and yet achingly sad, and portrays in a nutshell what the magician's life has become.

A chance encounter at a gig for a garden reception takes the magician to a small village in Scotland, where in an intimate tavern setting, he performs his act to a genuinely appreciative audience. But even this small victory is not to be left untouched, as no sooner is he done than the tavern owner installs a juke-box, playing records by the same rock-and-roll group that displaced him from his earlier theatrical gig. At the same time though, he meets a young girl who works at the tavern, a naive teenager named Alice, who becomes thoroughly entranced by his illusions, believing them to be real. An exchange of impulsive kindnesses she washes and irons his shirts; he gets her a badly-needed pair of new shoes, making them appear as if by magic forms the beginnings of a relationship that prompts Alice to follow him when he leaves the village to head to Edinburgh in hopes of finding work there.

In Edinburgh, a number of side characters are introduced. One of the best features of Chomet's style is how distinctive the personalities of even minor characters are. The two agents who take the magician on as a client are wonderfully done as they work to promote his act; the brief scene where they get him a gig at the local theater is priceless. And as the hotel where the magician and Alice settle in apparently caters to theater people, they meet a number of other performers, including a chatty ventriloquist, a depressed clown, and trio of constantly leaping acrobats, all of whom are facing the same difficulties as the magician.

The ending sequences are achingly sad as the magician faces not only that his way of life is fading but also that Alice's life is just beginning. When the magician takes his cantankerous rabbit and frees it on a hilltop, you feel that he is turning his back on his profession, but it is a later scene on a train where, in an exchange with a little girl who has lost her pencil, that you truly realize he has given up.

But even within the sadness and the defeat, the film does not give in completely. While the magician leaves Alice some money and a note which says "Magicians do not exist", the film suggests that the magician is wrong. In the empty hotel room, a gust of wind through the window causes the pages of a book to turn, casting shadows on the wall of a bird appearing and flying away, a classical image of magic acts. And as we see Alice walking away with the young man she has met, we realize that in the end, the magician has despite his assertion in fact unwittingly performed an act of magic of his own, the Pygmalionesque transformation of Alice from the shyly awkward and drab young girl he first met into a beautiful young woman venturing out into the world.

It's a different film from Triplets to be sure, and while it does not give one the happy ending one might initially have hoped for, it does stay true to itself, reminding us that even sadness has its own kind of beauty that we should not turn away from. Highly, highly recommended.

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Sylvain Chomet's "L'Illusioniste," based on an unproduced screenplay by Jacques Tati, is a worthy follow-up to his Oscar-winning "Triplets of Belleville," even if it is a gentler, less flamboyant work than its predecessor. "L'Illusioniste" is the story of Tatischeff (Tati's real name), a magician in 1959 Paris, who finds his old-fashioned hat-and-rabbit tricks in ever-diminishing demand. Forced to take a gig on a remote Scottish island, he entrances Alice, a young scullery maid who believes his tricks are real. When Tatischeff leaves to accept an engagement in Edinburgh, Alice stows away on the boat. The bulk of the movie is about the chaste, father-daughter relationship between Tatischeff and Alice, and their inevitable estrangement as Alice discovers the bigger world on her own.

Because "L'Illusioniste" is based on a screenplay that was meant to be a live-action film, Chomet's animation doesn't take Disneyesque liberties with the laws of gravity and physics. There are jokes and gags, but they are low-key and almost always included to make a serious, even melancholy point. (At one point Tatischeff stumbles into a movie theater showing "Mon Oncle," thus allowing him to come face-to-face with his doppelganger on the screen.) Tatischeff is one of the last survivors of a dying world, the world of the music hall, and we see his world constricting even as Alice's grows. Yet life and happiness go on, as symbolized by the drunken, kilted Scotsman who shows up in places both natural and unexpected. (Be sure to watch the credits to the very end; as in "The Triplets of Belleville," Chomet has a little surprise for us.)

There is not a single computer-generated image in "L'Illusioniste," and Chomet's hand-drawn panoramas of Paris, Edinburgh and the Scottish coast will take your breath away with their pensive beauty. "L'Illusioniste" is an animation for adults; it contains nothing children shouldn't see, but the themes and emotions it explores are not those children would understand. It is gentle, thoughtful, and exquisite.

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This wonderful film worked out as a posthumous Op of Jacques Tati, the major figure of the French illusionism, the poet, the naive but always smiling man whose clumsy actions always delighted us, but also the human being of endless kindness, respectful, gentlemanly behavior which represents an era that no longer exists.

The crude and acidic message nested under the script, is profoundly revealing and hopeless. The illusionist is an endangered species, a profession that has no place in a world like today where the fashioned artist rocker has supplanted it.

There's no time for such charming, the illusion is an old fashioned issue and now the frivolity's the master of the world.

The secondary line of the script is very touching too. With the dissapearance of the illusionism the loneliness is an unwanted guest, although he makes the best he can to rescue the humanity of that humble girl who once falls in love forgets him.

Another train, another hope, another city perhaps will wait for him, although the public will be limited.

Nostalgic and haunting film.

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If anyone wants to know the difference between foreign films and American ones a comparison of "The Illusionist" with "Toy Story 3" is a good place to start. Both are excellent movies in their own way...but employ very contrasting styles.

"Toy Story 3" takes some familiar characters, puts them in danger, provides laughs and tears, and ultimately delivers a satisfactory ending.

The "Illusionist" is all about sublety. There is practically no action and practically no dialogue. Ultimately it is a story about relationships the relationship between an out of date vaudevillian magician with his lost audience, the relationship of down-on-your luck theater performers living in the same tarnished hotel, the relationship of the magician with a young admirer who travels with him from an outpost in Scotland to the "big city" of Edinburgh.

Some might see this as the old giving space to the new...although it is not just about that. The young girl and the magician ultimately drift apart because their opinion of what is important was never the same anyway. This is the melancholy in the film.

It is a slow film totally unlike the bizarre, hectic zaniness of "Triplettes de Belleville." But whereas "Triplettes" is a cartoon of sorts, the story played out on film in "The Illusionist" is all too real. People, jobs, and expectations do go out of date...far more quickly today than ever.

I can't say enough good things how fantastic the animation looks on the screen those beautiful hand drawn watercolors. Now "this" is a film to get on Blu-Ray just to appreciate the marvelous artwork. In seeing hundreds of animated films...I have NEVER seen an illustrator do such a spectacular job in depicting light light in every shade and variety from the harsh lights of an electric bulb, to the golden light of lamps seen through windows, to the flashing red lights of the theatre district, to the evening light on the moors of Scotland. For that alone, the film is worth the price. One thinks of the French impressionists or the Dutch Vermeer in their use of the play of light in their art.

I am convinced that I could see this film twenty times....and if I do so, I will notice new nuances and interpretations each viewing. That's what I expect in a great film. And that is why the movie is worth owning.

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