The Illusionist [HD]

One of the Best Animated Films of 2010
The latest animated film by Sylvain Chomet is based on a script by the late Jacques Tati, who intended the film to be live-action but ended up never bringing the film to fruition. Tati died in 1982 and the script was passed to Chomet by Tati's daughter Sophie Tatischeff, who died before Chomet's debut feature-length, animated film The Triplets of Belleville was released. Since The Illusionist debuted it has been criticized by family members of Tati for straying from his original vision, as well as his original intention for writing the script in the first place. Since Tati is credited with writing the original script and Chomet is credited with adapting it, it is unknown how significantly Chomet altered the original script. Whether Chomet strayed from Tati's script or not becomes irrelevant as we can't judge a film based on what it could've been but for what it is. The fact is, the film exists in its current form...

Beautiful, sweet and achingly sad
The Illusionist is a beautifully-rendered animated story about a French stage magician, Tatischeff, and his relationship with a young Scottish girl named Alice, at a time when his kind of entertainment is being displaced by the onset of television and rock-and-roll.

Stylistically, The Illusionist will be immediately familiar to fans of Chomet's best-known film, The Triplets of Belleville. The animation is gorgeously detailed, the characters unique, and the story presented with virtually no dialogue, relying on an occasional comprehensible word or two emerging from deliberately garbled bursts of psuedo-language, French or Scottish-English depending on the setting.

Storywise though, The Illusionist is distinctly different from Triplets. While Triplets was imbued with a manic glee, The Illusionist is instead tinged throughout with a mix of sweetness and sadness. The film begins with Tatischeff's stage magician having to deal with a changing world in which his style...

Gentle, thoughtful, melancholy, and breathtakingly beautiful.
Sylvain Chomet's "L'Illusioniste," based on an unproduced screenplay by Jacques Tati, is a worthy follow-up to his Oscar-winning "Triplets of Belleville," even if it is a gentler, less flamboyant work than its predecessor. "L'Illusioniste" is the story of Tatischeff (Tati's real name), a magician in 1959 Paris, who finds his old-fashioned hat-and-rabbit tricks in ever-diminishing demand. Forced to take a gig on a remote Scottish island, he entrances Alice, a young scullery maid who believes his tricks are real. When Tatischeff leaves to accept an engagement in Edinburgh, Alice stows away on the boat. The bulk of the movie is about the chaste, father-daughter relationship between Tatischeff and Alice, and their inevitable estrangement as Alice discovers the bigger world on her own.

Because "L'Illusioniste" is based on a screenplay that was meant to be a live-action film, Chomet's animation doesn't take Disneyesque liberties with the laws of gravity and physics. There are...

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