I think the best description of the film is as follows “An 80-minute, hand-drawn animated French film without dialogue and with one of the most depressing finale acts ever committed to celluloid: this is The Illusionist. It’s also some sort of divine masterpiece.”
Set initially in Paris, through London, Scotland and eventually settling in Edinburgh this film follows the life of a magician and his dying art. No one is interested in his work and as he travels he finds that less and less people are coming to his shows. Along the way his magic entices a young girl, bored of her humdrum life, naïvely she latches onto him and being unworldly does not quite understand the value of money, the magician does nothing to discourage that, and produces gifts and treasures as if by magic, working extra hard to keep the illusion up.
The film was shot without dialogue and I do think they pulled this off very well. It is clever how you can get a sense of the story without the use of words, and how much was communicated through visuals alone. In some shots I really wanted to know what they were thinking, and wished they had some speech but I think this would have changed the film completely.
This was a very bizarre film, albeit it artistic. It was quite depressing and mopey throughout and never really picked up the mood. Slightly dark in context and the plot seemed to play on one continuous mood, and the story never changed. Despite this I still enjoyed the film, it was very artistic and I love the animation sense of style. I think I preferred the triplets of Belleville (his previous work) to this particular film however.
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