The origin of The Illusionist dates back to 1956 as an unproduced script written by Jacques Tati (the iconic French mime, actor, and director), famous for his classic character, Monsieur Hulot. It was written for his estranged daughter, and the bittersweet tone is one that’s not lost after all these years. The story is set in 1959 and follows a struggling magician named Tatisheff, who's in the twilight of his career as a performer. He draws small crowds and is being pushed into obscurity, forced to follow much more popular acts like flamboyant British rock bands. He finds himself in smaller and smaller venues until he’s hired to work in an isolated Scottish pub. It’s there he meets Alice, a young girl who believes he possesses true magical abilities. She follows him to Edinburgh where he goes to great lengths to please her, refusing to expose her to the bitter truth of his dying profession.
The combined talents of Jacques Tati and director Sylvain Chomet blend together to create something both original and full of charm. The entire film radiates with Chomet’s visual style but plays out a bit different from his other work, and I would credit this to the script of Tati more than anything else. Though the movie's dedicated to Tati’s daughter, it feels more like a dedication to his films (an excerpt from Mon Oncle is even shown during one scene). Tati’s visual humor is perfectly suited for Chomet’s style and characters, giving life to it in a whole new way. The pacing is also much slower and makes The Triplets of Belleville seem manic by comparison. Instead, the story is more grounded in the humanity of the central characters, delivering emotional value in its every frame. The backgrounds are beautifully animated to look as though they'd been painstaking drawn and detailed with a pencil and then painted with watercolors (which is something that’s unique to the look of Chomet’s films), leaving very memorable images.
As with Chomet’s previous film and short, there’s very little dialogue and much of the humor comes from visual gags as well as details in character interactions. While The Illusionist has more speaking than either The Old Lady and the Pigeons or The Triplets of Belleville, it comes in the form of noises that sound vaguely like French words or just pure gibberish. This is hardly a setback however, as the characters don’t really need to speak in order to express themselves. In fact, the lack of reliance on dialogue forces the characters to be that much more nuanced in their movements in order to emote or display complexity. The characters that inhabit the animated world of The Illusionist are all wonderfully expressive and diverse, and many are reminiscent of the caricatures that have become a standard of his stories. The hotel where Tatisheff and Alice stay is a sort of last stop for old entertainers. In one room there's a depressed drunken clown, in another, a ventriloquist, and in other, a trio of friendly acrobats. All of them are struggling to survive the changing times and the lack of interest in their craft, although some more than others; there's nothing funny about the suicidal depression of the clown.
While each character is a fun design, adding to the quirkiness and life of the film, the two major exceptions are the leads, Tatisheff and Alice. They stand out against the world around them as under-exaggerated and strangely human characters. Tatisheff is the animated stand in for Jacques Tati, and more than matches the qualities that would've been brought to the screen had it been filmed in live action. On the one hand, he's good-natured and clumsy, leading to many slight mishaps involving props or his foul tempered rabbit, but he's also a professional, and he performs his magic tricks with an obvious sense of pride, despite the depressing circumstances. His relationship with Alice is the heart of the film with her belief that his magic is real and therefore, without consequences. It’s here that their father/daughter relationship becomes the most clear. Hiding the painful truth from her eyes, he continuously gives and gives until there's nothing left. The self sacrifice in order to provide for her is touching, but bittersweet under the circumstances.
The Illusionist is a terrific animated film that can be appreciated universally, regardless of age or language. Seeing the continued work of a filmmaker like Sylvain Chomet is a breath of fresh air as he helps to keep 2D animation alive.
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