The Illusionist
(Sylvain Chomet, 2010)
The Illusionist is better than my rating would suggest. The hand-drawn animation is exquisite. Backgrounds pop with painstaking detail. Characters move with remarkable fluidity. Show me a random screenshot ten years from now and I'll instantly name the film, as the singular style gives
The Illusionist its own identity. The film achieves a level of sophistication and realism rarely seen in animation. I admire the silent-era approach to storytelling, although I think the characterization suffers mightily as a result. (I thought something was wrong with my hearing at first, as the sparse dialogue sounded like gibberish. I briefly put on subtitles and realized that the dialogue is inconsequential, captions merely reading, "Speaks in French" or "Speaks in foreign language.") The humor is intermittently amusing. The bittersweet ending will likely stay with me.
The Illusionist is deserving of all the praise it has received, but for me it's a classic case of respect the craft, dislike the film.
The Illusionist is based on an unproduced screenplay by celebrated actor/director Jacques Tati.
Playtime, my sole encounter with Tati, did nothing for me despite its reverence among many cinephiles. Judging by that one film, Tati's style of comedy relies heavily on intricate sight gags that require full attention from the viewer, as the "humor" is found within subtle details that aren't readily apparent unless you're studying the background of every scene.
The Illusionist feels like a simplified version of Tati's filmmaking, wholly reliant on the visual minus the nuance and intricacy. The comedy is similar but broader. The animated backgrounds are rich with detail, but unlike
Playtime, the viewer knows where to focus. The prevalence of wide shots with little to no close-ups feels like an attempt to recreate Tati's eye behind the camera. The titular illusionist is also an obvious stand-in for Tati himself. If the original script for
The Illusionist was penned as a love letter to Tati's estranged daughter,
The Illusionist itself is clearly created as a love letter to Tati as a filmmaker.
Maybe if I had more familiarity with Tati's work, I'd better appreciate what director Sylvain Chomet was attempting with this film. As it is, however,
The Illusionist did little for me. I watched this in the middle of the afternoon, yet I was struggling to keep my eyelids open by the end of it. The lullaby-like score might be partially to blame for inducing fatigue, but I think my indifference toward the characters is a bigger culprit. Judging by the movie's heavy-handed sentimentality, viewers are clearly expected to care for the adopted father-daughter relationship at the core of the story. Instead, I just found the relationship borderline creepy. Maybe that's just me being a horrible cynic, always expecting the worst from everyone, but as the illusionist charms the young girl with magic tricks and allows her to move in with him, I couldn't help but wonder if he was secretly hoping to perform hide-the-salami instead of hide-the-rabbit. Questionable motives aside, I did feel sympathy for the illusionist once he's forced to abandon his craft to work demeaning jobs; but that turn of events makes the girl unlikeable as a result, essentially turning her into the welfare version of a gold digger, since it's her fondness for gifts that drives the illusionist deeper into poverty. The bittersweet ending (emphasis on the bitter) surprised me with its deep sense of melancholy and regret, but I was mostly just happy that the film was over. Even at only 79-minutes,
The Illusionist feels like an obscenely padded short film.
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Very true! I know next to nothing about animated films. Though I did see Heavy Metal at the drive-in movie theater, like a million years ago
