So Beautiful, but It Lacks Substance

Everyone knows what a Pixar movie looks like by now. Who doesn’t love Toy Story, Wall-E or Up? The stories are always great and the animation is so good that it can make you forget it’s animation. There are no messy lines with Pixar, no sharp edges, no smudges. Even when a character is “flawed,” like the boneless, obese residents aboard the space station in Wall-E, they’re kind of cute. Pixar always delivers a message in its movies, but the delivery comes in a nice, tidy package.

Then there’s French animator Sylvain Chomet. He directed 2003’s The Triplets of Belleville, which was nominated for two Academy Awards, including best animated feature. Chomet’s characters are decidedly not cute, and their body language and postures are ones you’ll recognize from standing in line at the DMV. His colors are deep, saturated and pulled from the rarely used section of the crayon box; his backgrounds could be sold as paintings. Chomet is an artist, satirist and student of human behavior working as an animator, and I still think The Triplets of Belleville is one of the best movies, ever.

But that brings us to his latest film, The Illusionist. It has a back story worth knowing. In 1956, the great French mime, director and actor Jacques Tati wrote the original script as a love letter to his estranged eldest daughter. He hoped that they would star in it together, with his playing the illusionist, but the movie never came to pass. Tati died, and in 2003 the script was passed to Chomet when The Triplets of Belleville premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. This was because Tati's youngest daughter did not want an actor to play her father.

Chomet has now brought The Illusionist to the screen, and I fear that it suffers from its age and the complicated relationship between Tati and his eldest. Here’s the story: After being fired from a theater in London, an aging illusionist (Jean-Claude Donda) gets a much-needed job in a tiny Scottish fishing village. There he meets Alice (Eilidh Rankin), a painfully shy country girl who only speaks Gaelic, who comes to believe that he can really do magic. When the illusionist’s job is over, Alice follows him back to Edinburgh, where his new agent gets him a job in a local theater.

The rest of The Illusionist is beautiful to the eye but disappointing as an emotionally involving story. Strangely—and sadly—the illusionist’s love for Alice manifests entirely in his buying things for her that she sees in store windows and tells him she wants. Alice wanders Edinburgh with no urge to create a life of her own, while the illusionist takes second jobs and tries to keep them afloat. When Alice meets a handsome young man and begins seeing him on the sly, the illusionist is devastated.

Aside from it being an antiquated story of a young woman being passed from her father to her groom, The Illusionist never really gathers steam as the portrait of a lonely man connecting with someone against his will. Maybe Tati’s screenplay was never produced for a reason. 

As I am prone to do, I asked my fellow audience members what they thought of the film. Here's what they had to say:

"It was a silent movie." —Jake, Laguna Niguel

"I like happy endings better." —Allen, Mission Viejo

"I didn't know it was an animated movie, but he [Sam] got to decide which movie we'd see today. I thought it was OK." —Joanna, Mission Viejo

"It was all right, but I liked Amélie better." —Sam, Mission Viejo