Much attention has been paid to Toy Story 3’s nomination for Best Picture in addition to the expected nomination in Best Animated Feature in this year’s Academy Awards. The fact that there’s almost no chance it will win in the Best Feature category virtually guarantees it will be awarded Best Animated Feature, overshadowing the more artful contender, Sylvain Chomet’s The Illusionist, and reinforcing A.O. Scott’s recent complaint about “the peculiar and growing irrelevance of world cinema in American movie culture, which the Academy Awards help to perpetuate.” The feature animation category is woefully underrepresented this year, with three nominees (these two, plus How to Train Your Dragon, directed by Dean DeBlois) culled from a short field of fifteen films, especially unfortunate given the richness of contemporary animation.
The Illusionist brings a fascinating lineage to the screen: it is directed by Sylvain Chomet, whose earlier film, The Triplets of Belleville (2003), showed how love can lead a club-footed granny into gangster dens to protect her own, carnivalesque mayhem punctuating the rescue. He adapted his latest offering from a never-produced screenplay by Jacques Tati, French comic genius whose film, Holiday, had a brief appearance in Chomet’s 2003 feature. The Illusionist was written by Tati between 1956 and 1959, never produced perhaps because its wistful themes were too personal and too serious for another Hulot misadventure. His daughter offered Chomet the script, seeing his animation style as an ideal vehicle for bringing character to life.
The Illusionist is from a by-gone era, trying to ply his outmoded magic at a moment of transition from vaudeville to rock 'n' roll, though the film’s beginning suggests that he may always already have been out of sync, time passing without mercy. As his performances garner smaller and smaller audiences, he travels an increasingly remote circuit, landing at the Isle of Iona where his arrival is accompanied by electricity’s debut. Here, Alice, a young girl, embraces his magic, in thrall with the possibilities of other worlds. Following him back to Edinburgh, she keeps house for him while he keeps her illusions intact. Offering his gifts, he works odd jobs to afford the small luxuries. But time does pass and young girls mature; romance replaces magic, and the Illusionist takes his own step into the present.
Chomet is an artist in a world of technicians; his hand-drawn landscapes are infused with shifting light that reflects depths of beauty and could carry the films on their own. But technically, his films impress even the wonkiest among animation buffs. Characters are rendered in 2D animation, and 3D augments, rendering fast-moving props more easily. So a single scene combines both styles, with a car steering wheeling in 3D but the hands driving it in 2D.
The menagerie of performers illustrate Chomet’s talent at crafting memorable characters: Bill Boy and the Brittons displace The Illusionist with their over-the-top rock shows, a ventriloquist, clown, and acrobat troupe populate the timeworn hotel, and The Illusionist’s carnivorous, bad-tempered rabbit bites the hand that feeds him every chance he gets. Hand-drawn, 2D graphics lend an ethereal quality to scenery and energy to characters. Chomet explains: “The strength of 2D is it vibrates and it’s not perfect, just like reality in fact. Imperfections are important when you are dealing with a story about human characters. It adds realism, makes it even more potent.” The artistry shines through on the screen, in rich landscapes and captivating characters. Nothing is tossed in or tossed off and viewers’ attention can be held at any point on the screen.
The film’s lack of dialogue allows other sound to add layers of complexity and detail; the few words exchanges don’t convey information so much as punctuate a scene, like background noise. Animator Lauren Kircher, who took the lead with The Illusionist character, describes the “aural mosaic” of sound, music, and images in Tati’s films that Chomet’s strove to emulate. The lack of dialogue leads viewers more deeply into the film, creating a cooler medium that asks for us to attend more rather than less closely.
It is a bittersweet story, and try as I might, I can’t decide what to do with the Illusionist’s final message to Alice: “Magicians don’t exist.” Perhaps the film’s deepest beauty lies in its refusal to see this passing of time as tragic or joyous, finding beauty in the movement regardless of the implications. After all, there’s nothing we can do to change the fact. Life is suffering. Life is beautiful. The two co-exist in Chomet’s films to breathtaking results.
St. Louis’s animation landscape also features My Dog Tulip for a one-week run at Frontenac. One of the feature animated short-listed but not nominated for Best Picture, the film is directed and animated by Paul and Sandra Fierlinger and adapted from J.R. Ackerley’s 1956 memoir of the same name, voiced by Christopher Plummer and featuring the voice talents of Lynn Redgrave and Isabella Rossellini. Entirely hand-drawn and painted using paperless computer technology, the film features 58,320 drawings, in four graphic styles: finished sketches of daily life, simple elongated drawings of Ackerley’s fantasies, black-and-white distant memories, and whimsical doodles. The source material is long a classic, and this adaptation is largely faithful, sometimes shocking in the level of candor and precision with which film treats dogs’ bodily functions, behavior changes during heat, and canine tastes. Wry and funny in terms, the film details without sentimentalizing the love affair between a midlife single man and his German shepherd.
