Harry's Place Arts

Watching The Illusionist is like stepping into a marvellously  illustrated story book, and wandering through the pictures for an hour and a half.  This film is a hand-drawn animation feature by Sylvain Chomet, based on a script by Jacques Tati and it‘s enchanting.  Critics have called it a love-letter to Scotland, and he does love the country’s finest features, which he reproduces minutely and tenderly.  He loves the shadows that the clouds cast on the hills and moors, he loves how a loch or the sea can look like a mirror one minute, be torn to shreds by wind and storm the next.  He loves the magical quality of Edinburgh, the grand buildings and the backstreet squalor.  He imagines the city in the late fifties and early sixties when its principal street wasn’t  full of dull chain shops like any street in Britain and when the people were stiffer and more stylish.  He loves the rain and the light.


He loves the place as a foreigner does, and as a foreigner he has to include quaint Highlanders, sheep and flapping kilts – yes, he does fall into tweeness.

If this film was not so beautifully drawn, if you could not freeze each frame and look at it with delight to catch each tiny detail, as in a medieval Book of Hours, it would be insufferably mawkish.  The story is  sentimental, full of elegiac pathos.  A magician with a fading career in the music halls heads to Scotland and ends up doing a gig in a pub in the Western Isles.  A downtrodden girl who works there follows him like a stray dog to Edinburgh.  He adopts her and treats her like a little Princess daughter, plying his craft to buy her some pretty things.  But his kind of entertainment is being ousted by raucous rock and roll, and he sinks lower and lower in the entertainment scale.  Imagine that tale told in Hollywood terms, with Dustin Hoffmann wet-eyed as the has-been entertainer with a cute moppet at his heels.  So I wasn’t much taken by the story but delighted by how it looked.  The narrative drive that normally keeps you in your seat at a film was replaced by a willingness to be charmed by Chomet’s  passion – the passion for the particular beauty of Scotland and Edinburgh, and the passion for the craft of the animator.

Trailer
[Can't put video straight into post for some reason, though I can do that on other sites with WordPress.]