Starring: The voices of Jean-Claude Donda, Eilidh Rankin
Directed By: Sylvain Chomet
Written By: Sylvain Chomet, adapted from a screenplay by Jacques Tati
Produced By: Bob Last, Sally Chomet
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Rating: PG
Running Time: Approximately 80 minutes
Website: sonyclassics.com/theillusionist
Budget: $17 million
Genre: Animated
Release Date: February 11, 2011
More than a few eyebrows were raised when the Academy Awards nominations for 2010 were released and, in the Best Animated Feature category, listed next to no-brainers like Toy Story 3 and the warmly regarded How to Train Your Dragon, was a little seen French feature from The Triplets of Belleville director Sylvain Chomet called The Illusionist. Oscar buffs scratched their heads, animation junkies scrambled to find out what they could about this unexpected contender.
The Illusionist is an oddball entry in more ways than one. The illusionist himself is Tatischeff (one of many nods to late French director Jacques Tati, whose screenplay Chomet freely adapts), among the last of an old guard of stage performers whose heyday peaked with vaudeville and now nears extinction in the 1950s. Tatischeff faces diminishing returns as he takes his staid, practiced act, complete with a rabbit in a hat, to a series of increasingly small and humiliating venues. He finally finds an appreciative audience in a coastal village in Scotland, a town so small the locals are entertained by their first ever functioning light bulb.
It’s there that he meets young Alice, a teenager working as a maid and waitress for a rowdy pub crowd. Despite their language barrier – he speaks French, she Gaelic – Alice finds herself enchanted by the illusionist’s tricks, and he in turn finds a willing audience to be entertained by his hoary stage act. The two form a familial bond that extends beyond that Scottish village, and Alice runs off to Edinburgh to join Tatischeff as he begins a run of performances at a local theatre. Alice keeps house at their boarding house, entertaining other stage acts like acrobats and ventriloquists and fending off a hostile bunny who maybe doesn’t appreciate being stuffed into top hats. As Alice grows up and the illusionist finds it harder and harder to maintain their lifestyle, he clandestinely takes on a series of supplemental jobs he is neither good at nor qualified for, and the time comes for both of them to do a little growing up.
Jean-Claude Donda and Eilidh Rankin voice the title character Alice, but their contributions are mostly in the form of gibberish mixed with bits of French and Gaelic; there’s so little dialogue, the film isn’t even subtitled. The Illusionist is functionally a silent film, the story told through Chomet’s expressive hand-drawn animation. Like its main characters, the language isn’t a barrier. Studios like Pixar and DreamWorks have the market cornered on a particular brand of animated family film, child-friendly yarns with enough sentimental wistfulness to appeal to an adult audience.
The Illusionist carries its own different and distinctive sensibility, that particular sense of French whimsy that seems simultaneously nostalgic yet disdainful. To use one of the movie’s own running gags: yes, the bunny is cute, but you never know when he’ll try to bite you. The Illusionist mourns the loss of the vanishing art form of the vaudeville stage act from the world, with alcoholic ventriloquists and suicidal clowns – try that on for size, Toy Story 3 – while urging the world to move along into the next thing it will become. That sensibility carries over to the film’s ending, a down note in a movie full of preciousness and heartbreak. Disney wouldn’t dare to touch this movie’s tone, not because they can’t manage an emotional resonance with their audiences (lest we invoke Toy Story again), but because the feeling is so specific to Chomet, to Tati, and the little handmade world they’ve created with The Illusionist.
I suspect young children will get a bit restless with this movie despite the slapstick, and parents a little uncomfortable with its surprisingly mature refusal to offer a tidy ending that leaves all parties satisfied, but there is a “sweet spot” audience that will embrace both its quirk and its craft, a lot of heart tempered by a lot of cynicism. The Academy will probably want to honor Toy Story in the franchise’s waning days, and that’s fine and deserved, but the presence of The Illusionist in the category is an equally worthy choice for entirely different reasons, a stark reminder that an animated movie is not always about what toys it can sell, but the unique perspective it can bring to an audience.
3.5 Stars
