Illusionist makes a lot of bold decisions. It certainly isn't a film that is going to be for everyone. The 2D animation is very striking. The movie is almost entirely dialogue free, letting the visuals do the heavy lifting of the story telling. The story focuses on the escapades of a struggling magician. He then meets a delightful younger woman, and a friendship begins to blossom between the two. At that point in the story, I roughly assumed where the story would go from there, but the story does indeed take various unexpected twists. Nothing mind boggling but certainly things I didn't see coming. A dialogue free story should keep things simple. The conflicts should be fairly straight forward and easy to comprehend just through the visuals. Something like the "Shaun the Sheep" movies do well with this concept. "The Illusionist" was just a little too ambitious with this idea. The subtleties of internal conflicts do not work as well for a story with no talking. Without going into spoilers, the ending was so abrupt that I literally had to rewind the movie to see if I missed something. With the way it ends, you ask, what was even the main point of the story? I respect the movie for what it was trying to do. I would show it to a class to demonstrate visual story telling. Still a neat trick but could have used a bit more magic.

I'ma sucker for Chomet films: Wife & I agreed to get married after seeing The Triplets of Belleville. So we've got wall to wall history.😁 But somehow we'd never gotten around to seeing this one. Course it's a profound love letter to Tati - he's the centerpiece character of the flick! But this Jacque Tati/"Hulot" plays *fundamentally different* than any of Tati's comedic Msr Hulot films. This is a sad and thoughtful, and substantially backward looking and nostalgic view and film - as heavily contrasts with Tati's own frequent space-age/ultra-modern 'chaos' settings - in this case depicting sincere regret in Tati's personal family life choices. Moving, and left my wife & I both discussing the film, for quite awhile after watching.

Being a great admirer of Tati's work I was intrigued by the idea of an animated take on him. Not good! Tati's humor is focused on the basic funniness of regular people-- something inherently impossible to portray convincingly through animation. This man was a great mime artist, and no set of drawings can possibly capture the genius and angular grace of his physical movements. Further, Tati *celebrated* life, while this thing is sooo melancholy! This project seems very pointless, though to those unacquainted with Tati's films it might seem okay, sort of...

Like Les Triplettes de Belleville, the animation is mesmerizing. If you're watching on your 온라인카지노추천 you'll be freezing the action a lot just to take in the background. This time it's the critics who get it right. The public is too immature to appreciate the slowness and richness of this melancholy tale. Jacques Tati is the film. Sylvain Chomet is a genius in animation.

Lovely style of animation and a really heartfelt story.

Overlong film with many redundent scenes. Indeed, all the scenes are overcooked. The plot meanders painfully like a drunken dog. The music is boring. The characters are not engaging in the least. The vision of the world given is nostalgic and depressive. There are occasional stabs at humour but they all fail. The theme of the older magician and the younger girl is suspect but the flm lacks the wit to acknoledge this. The views of Edinburgh and Scotland are obvious touristic ones and it offers few insights into life in Scotland in the 50s. The only thing remarkable about this dud is that it should get such high star ratings.

A little disappointing, I thought it would be more dream-like and whimsical...... beautiful animation though.

This film is so sad. Although the conversation happening is very little. It tells about the struggles of entertainers in the development era. and We all do know that the Illusionist is a SIMP!

Gotgeous animation but story is way too slow, the pace only makes the plots seem more contrived and overworked than it is.

I really loved it! it was beautifully filmed and well acted. Felt like a fairytale with dark features that made it more interesting.

One of my favorites and it is so heart warming. Utterly beautiful

Based on a screenplay for a never made Jacques Tati film, this is a touching homage to the great Frenchman, perfectly capturing his moments of humour, sadness, and humanity. Our lead, the illusionist, even looks like Tati, with the animation faithfully mimicking his stature, expressivity, and clumsiness. Sylvain Chomet directs this beautiful hand-drawn animated feature, which fully captures the whimsy of Tati's cinematic worlds. This film, despite its comedic elements, is a melancholic tale of a new culture emerging to replace the old guard. This is highlighted from the get go when the illusionist's act is shunned for that of a trendy modern rock band. He searches high and low for his place in this new world, even going to a remote Scottish town, but ultimately his style of entertainment no longer fits in. Instead, he selflessly sacrifices his own career to give a new prosperous life to a young and awestruck girl from this small Scottish town. Through the illusionist she sees the real world she's been cut off from, and with his help, she grows into a young, beautiful, modern and independent woman. The illusionist's heyday has passed him by, but he finds some meaning through helping another. Jacques Tati's career ended with a more pensive feel to his films. This film perfectly highlights the middle-ground between his moments of hilarity, and his more reflective, sorrowful moments. Through the sad ending, where the illusionist releases his rabbit, a symbol of his career, into the wild, and leaves on a train, we are also treated to a more optimistic view of our other lead finding love for the first time. This is a perfect homage, made with passion and care, and is a great and deeply affecting, though delayed sendoff to a cinematic great.

Amazing animation movie. Hilarious and beautiful. It's almost like watching the best children's book you've ever read.

Despite it being animated greatly, the plot is generic and uninspired and he characters make terrible decisions. Although I like silent films, do NOT watch this one.

After a long time; after ParaNorman to be precise; I have watched a beautiful animation film. There are some scenes which are simultaneously sweet as well as melancholic and you cannot do anything else but praise the film.

Gorgeous and mesmerizing.

It's another Jacques Tati feature come to life, even though the comic auteur himself died in 1982. In actuality, he wrote the script (sometime after Mon Oncle) and his daughter asked animator Sylvain Chomet (who also did The Triplets of Bellville, 2003) to create the film, so that no live actor would end up playing her father. Although not specifically M. Hulot, the Illusionist (named Tatischeff - Tati's real name) gets into the same serene bungles, as he accommodates to the early 1960's and the slow fade-out of the music-hall trade. He isn't alone in the seedy old hotel in Edinburgh where most of the film takes place - assorted clowns, ventriloquists, and acrobats also live there, feeling despair or seeking other ways to bring in money (Tatischeff moonlights in a garage). All told, there is a wistful bittersweet air to the proceedings, not least because the illusionist is more-or-less adopted by a young girl (a cleaner at one of the venues he's played at) who moves in with him and they develop a sweet wordless relationship that ends when it is time for her to move on and him to declare that magicians do not exist. Oh but they do - not just in the form of Tati himself but also in the form of Chomet who has brought a thing of real beauty to the screen, hand-drawn but computer animated, subtly coloured in reds, greens, and browns, Miyazaki-like in the pleasure it takes in the environments that surround the action. A wonderful tribute to the French legend and a contribution to his oeuvre (and to animation's highlight reel) in its own right.

The Illusionist is an odd little film that doesn't do much but is charming enough to get away with it. The film is Sylvain Chomet's follow-up to The Triplets of Bellville, and anyone who's remotely familiar with that film won't be surprised to hear that this features some unique animation. Even more noteworthy, however, is the decision to make the film virtually dialogue-less. It's a bold choice, but the sweet central relationship-and the wonderfully slim running time-ultimately makes the lack of dialogue an acceptable and enjoyable stylistic choice. If only the film carried a little more heft, I'd be able to give it as strong a recommendation as its fellow Best Animated Feature nominees, Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon. The film takes place in post-WWII Scotland and England, and follows an old-fashioned illusionist who is getting up there in years and losing a little of his talent-not to mention the fact that magic as a form of entertainment is being shunned in favor of rock-and-roll. So the illusionist travels along, struggling to find an audience. But a young girl he meets in a pub, Alice, is immediately taken by his magic. She thinks it's real and decides to follow the illusionist on his "UK tour," so to speak. The two develop quite a bond, but in his quest to make Alice happy, the illusionist buys her things and begins to go into debt. The result of his problems will change their relationship and give both of them a tough life lesson. Though punctuated with moments of gentle humor, The Illusionist is a drama through and through. The overall arc of the film is actually quite tragic, as we observe the decline of a delightful profession and the dissolution of Alice's innocence. That being said, the film never gets too serious. The simple charms of the animation are enough to keep a smile on your face, and watching these two individuals bond is the film's chief pleasure. I'm unfamiliar with Jacques Tati, but from what I've read it's impossible to see this film and not discuss the beloved French comedian and filmmaker. The Illusionist comes from the mind of Tati, and the illusionist himself is supposed to be modeled after him. Not knowing Tati or his work, I'd say the film reminded of the work of someone like Buster Keaton. The illusionist is clumsy at times, and his mishaps are quite funny. But the humor is never over-the-top. All the laughs are relatively subtle, and they help give the film a good, steady pace. Ultimately, though, The Illusionist just feels like a minor entry in the surprisingly good 2010 film canon. I consistently enjoyed it, but I rarely felt crazy, head-over-heels, in love with it. The smiles it brought to my face were welcome, but it hasn't left much of an impact on me. But if you're looking for a pleasant way to spend an hour and 15 minutes, The Illusionist is a better than solid choice. http://www.johnlikesmovies.com/illusionist-2010-review/

I like this type of old-school animations that really tell a story with a striking sentimentalism. It was slow and uneventful but without much speaking, it sure does justice to the story.

Until a few days ago, I had never heard of Jacques Tati. Through a group of friends I was introduced to some clips of his early b&w work, and went searching on youtube for more. Which led me to this diamond. Tati never actually made this film. He wrote a script for the story. After his death, the script found its way to Chomet's hands. Where it lay, undisturbed, for a few more years, until Chomet finally made this masterwork. The animation is 2-D, classic, and magnificent. The scenes, in general, are evocative of their real counterparts. Especially the scenes of Scotland. One feels that you could walk on the same ground the animator protrays. And you possibly could, as Chomet intentionally used real locations as the source material for the animations. The film feels as if it were a strictly accurate remake of one of Tati's films of the period. It is set in that time, between the 30's and the 50's, when electricity was new to many rural areas. Like the Herriot books, this film captures something of that transitional time. Unlike Herriot, Tati's plot pictures some of the tragedy those changes created. Perhaps somewhat unintentionally, the film is something of a philosophic pondering of the impacts of the changes those years saw. The one dissonance I found in the story was that the time appeared to be telescoped, with the band characters looking like something out of the 1950's, with presaging elements of more recent musical artists. Unless rural electrification was still ongoing in the 1950's for Europe. Also, at one point in the film, there is a news headline on a street stand "Is It War?", which would indicate a pre-WW2 timing. Still this is a minor quibble, and adds nicely to the overall telling of the story. <> Perhaps it is the wrenching of that passage of times, but I ultimately found the film to be tragic. Others will see the film as romantic, but it is bittersweet. The comedic line is always there, as well, for us to laugh and enjoy. It is a beautiful, enchanting tale.