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Tuesday Tease: Sylvain Chomet’s THE ILLUSIONIST Reminds What Animation Should Be


Official Synopsis

An old magician on the decline meets a young girl that will change his life forever. Based on an original script by French comic genius, Jacques Tati.

What We Learned:

  • Rabbits are a tricky sort.
  • Wonderful animation is wonderful.
  • This is not the Ed Norton flick that competed with THE PRESTIGE so many years ago. Please do not confuse the two.

Why We’re Gonna Watch:
French director/writer Sylvain Chomet of THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE fame is directing again. After viewing the trailer for THE ILLUSIONIST we considered renaming the film THANK GOD FOR SYLVAIN CHOMET. All signs hint to this being a genius of animation that puts Disney to shame…again.

‘I’ve lived all over the place,” says the great French animator Sylvain Chomet, “but I seem to do well in countries that need their independence.”

Seriously, this guy is fast becoming our new animation hero.

When’s it coming?
ILLUSIONIST has already released in France and several other countries. It’s about to drop in the UK. It won’t hit the US until December. And that will be just a limited release.

Life remains unfair.

Official site(s):

The Illusionist, based on an unproduced script by the legendary French comic actor-director Jacques Tati, is quintessential Chomet. Its hero is Monsieur Tatischeff (Tati’s real name), an old-school conjuror who closely resembles Tati in his later years. By the late 1950s, he is barely scraping a living in the nightclubs and music halls of Paris. In search of work, he journeys to London, Scotland’s Western Isles, and then to Edinburgh.

At the heart of The Illusionist is Tatischeff’s gentle, father-and-daughter-like relationship with Alice, a young Scottish girl he meets on the isle of Iona. Though he is virtually penniless, he generously showers her with gifts, which she is convinced he can produce by magic.

Yet the film’s strength lies in its visual beauty. Every frame looks like a delicate watercolour. Chomet has taken great pains to capture Edinburgh’s unique geography, architecture and its distinctive light. Its hills, buildings, alleyways, corner shops, vistas and buses look exactly as they did in 1959.

Via telegraph, IMDB

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This entry was posted on August 17, 2010, 11:14 and is filed under Animation, Interviews, Movies, On the French, One Sheets, Trailers. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.