February 13, 2011: The Illusionist (2010)
I saw The Triplets of Belleville (2003) when it came out, and its charming story and rambling animation style immediately won fans, including myself. The Illusionist is the latest from the team which brought us that delightful earlier effort. However, I found The Illusionist to be a relentlessly downbeat film and I couldn’t see the point of it all, so while the lighthearted humour and charm are still there at times, and the animation is similarly defiant of today’s ultra-realistic computer-based work, I couldn’t connect to the story and it ultimately fell flat for me.
Nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, The Illusionist was as usual up against the latest from Pixar, in this case Toy Story 3 which ultimately won the award. The Triplets of Belleville was also nominated and defeated by the Pixar entry of its day, Finding Nemo. The story here follows a travelling magician as he scrapes out a living in Scotland, against the majestic backdrop of Edinburgh Castle. He ends up taking a young woman under his wing, and they travel together as he plies his trade and she takes care of him. He brings momentary joy to people’s lives with his magic, but becomes increasingly irrelevant as the world grows cynical about magic. And that’s about it, as far as I could tell. There’s plenty of insider back-story to this film, it being based on an unfilmed semi-autobiographical story written in the 1950s by legendary and now-three-decades-deceased French filmmaker Jacques Tati, but I’d need to watch at least a few more movies to even comment on that angle, so I’ll go the half-assed route with this one.
Animation legend drags us all down.
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