by Jake Bourgeois, Contributing Writer
I’ve always had a soft spot for animation. More years than not, at least a couple of animated features find their way onto my top 10 list. So, I’m setting out to shine a light on some films that may have passed you by. The idea with Animation Celebration is to take a look at some underseen gems — so no Toy Story or Frozen here.
Let’s get started.
We’ve time for one more column before this year’s Academy Awards ceremony, so it’s time to dive in to one last underseen film that’s gotten a Best Animated Feature Film nod.
The Illusionist’s, or L’illusionniste, appeal to me was really quite simple: It’s a story about magic and I love magician’s tales. I found this a complex watch.
It’s directed by Sylvain Chomet, who also directed The Triplets of Belleville (which we may revisit next year when the Oscars roll around once again), and he’s got quite the intriguing résumé when it comes to this list. In the early years of the award, there were usually only three nominees were put forward, with a couple rare exceptions when there were five. Chomet’s the only indie director to show up twice in this period.
Despite this, the most intriguing member of the crew was legendary late director, actor, and performer Jacques Tati. Based off one of his unpublished scripts, there are conflicting thoughts from Chomet and the family of Tati’s eldest daughter on for whom the play was written. The changes that Chomet made to his original script during the adaptation process and the feelings of some of Tati’s family about them is a rabbit hole all its own, but one that needs at least acknowledgement. A letter penned by Tati’s grandson, describes the sore feelings on the matter.
Trying to separate the script from the personal feelings, it’s easy to see why it caught hold of people. I liked how the story starts us out in the early shows at the big cities where there’s a lack of passion for what he’s doing. Then he performs in a small Scottish town, where he gets the warmest welcome by far, and meets a young woman who decides to accompany him to his next stop. What I was expecting was for this crowd reaction and his new companion to reignite his spark. The summary states (via Letterboxd), “A French illusionist travels to Scotland to work. He meets a young woman in a small village. Their ensuing adventure in Edinburgh changes both their lives forever.” With that knowledge going in, I was expecting that to be at the heart of the film, and for a while, it is. During the course of their time together, we see her kindness when it comes to the other performers staying at the hotel, but also the financial strains that providing for this young woman put on our titular magician, who was a portrait of a struggling artist when he was solo to begin with.
What it slowly transitions to is a melancholic, at times dark, look at these more traditional performers who are struggling to find their place as rock and roll takes their stages by storm, as illustrated by this film’s Beatles stand-ins. The reversal of my expectations was something that I found immensely intriguing, and this was the aspect I found I connected with more than our duo’s relationship.
Though I’ve never seen one of Tati’s films prior to this (I’ve come close before, and this pushes Mon Oncle close to the top of the list), just knowing basic background about him makes his influence on this film very apparent. There’s even a clip of one of his films inserted into the film. There’s not a ton of real dialogue, though even when there were snippets, my closed captioning didn’t seem to be cooperating on the Roku site. Scots sound closer to Robin Williams’s rendition of a Scotsman as they recount the invention of the sport of golf than any intelligible words, though the gist is easy enough to get. Much like Tati’s work as a mime, it’s much more reliant on the visual performance — how the characters move and gesture. I’m not sure I could tell you five words spoken, but it didn’t negatively impact my experience.
The film really does focus on the visual aspect of the medium. As I’ve stated before, I’m not a hand-drawn purist, but I have come to really appreciate the watercolor feel of these European animation studios during this period. For a film about the struggle of an artist, having that hand-drawn touch here does feel appropriate. In setting the scene at our various locales, whether Paris, London, or Edinburgh, the score works nicely in concert with the visual aspect of the film. It’s very much a mood film, and the music helps set that.
If you go in knowing what to expect, I really do think it’s an exploration of an artist worth taking.
Before we close for this month, there was something that really irked me as I was making my decision for last month’s selection, that I was glad to see might have been changing a little bit at least during the lead up to the Oscars. Despite their Academy Award nominations, finding one of these underseen films that was actually available on one of the numerous streaming sites was a challenge. That’s particularly frustrating given Best Animated Feature Film is a relatively new Oscar category and every single film I was considering during this window was released 2010 or later. As Oscar nominees, you’d hope that there would be a bit higher chance that they would be more easily accessible than some of the series’ other selections. At least for this month (even compared to last month), that appears to be the case. A handful of options that weren’t streaming last month have made their way to a streamer ahead of this year’s awards.
I have no problem shelling out for a rental in this series, as I do on occasion. However, it would seem odd to bemoan that nobody’s watching smaller independent animated films like this when they’re not being distributed in a way that gives at least some segment of the audience a simple way of somehow stumbling across it. It’s nice to see that, at least as this year’s ceremony approaches, that accessibility is there a bit more.
And with that said…
I’m excited to continue to geek out on some great animated work you may not have had a chance to catch. Next month’s column releases after the Oscars. So, we’ll be moving away from underseen Oscar noms.
You can read more from Jake Bourgeois, and follow him on Twitter and Letterboxd