The Illusionist

[The Ilusionist] Directed by Sylvain Chomet Runtime: 90 min.

Fantasia (Walt Disney DVD)

The new DVD re-release of Disney's 1940 Fantasia blesses what has been a great year for animated movies, the form’s creativity expanding in many directions: From nearly photographic CGI ([Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole]) and drawn/photographed hybrids (How to Train Your Dragon) to uncommonly witty 3D ([Despicable Me](http://www.nypress.com/article-21414-despicable-me.html)) and refined traditional animation ([The Secret of Kells](http://www.nypress.com/article-20975-grim-illumination.html), [My Dog Tulip](http://www.nypress.com/article-21579-my-dog-tulip.html)). Sylvain Chomet’s [The Illusionist ](http://www.sonyclassics.com/theillusionist/)climaxes this productive run with its updated recreation of classic animated style: a return to the possibilities of animation as Fantasia, with its multiple tones, varied episodes and restless invention, timelessly realized.

However, fine as The Illusionist is, it’s too delicate and languorous for commercial success in the coarse, shallow Pixar era. French animator Chomet’s illustration of an unproduced screenplay by the late auteur Jacques Tati (1907-1982) confirms that, like all great cinema, Tati’s films (Jour de Fete, Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Mon Oncle, Playtime, Traffic) were about the visual representation of physical and imaginary experience. As rescue jobs of never-filmed auteur scripts go, The Illusionist is movingly faithful, not a botch like Lars Von Trier’s disgrace of Carl Dreyer’s Medea. Tati, always his own protagonist, is represented in a Chomet caricature that captures the loping slant, high-water pants and anomie. This Tatischeff figure (based on Tati’s family name) who performs magic in small, sparsely attended theaters from France to Scotland, is an old-school artist and chivalrous knight who helps a young girl realize her social and romantic dreams—which take an ideal form in animated atmospheric studies of natural and citified existence.

As Chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle, I dreaded that the group would vote its annual animation award to that consumer’s pacifier Toy Story 3. Happily, the vote went to The Illusionist—sanity, taste and critical regard for cinema history prevailed.

The Illusionist is no substitute for the life-likeness of a Tati film (his best contained both best Chaplin sentiment and Altman community) but it restores gracefulness to the animated form’s recently crude manipulations ([Shrek] dreck). Chomet keeps Tati’s sense of frame space—not his unique visual tension, but Tati’s insistence that the screen image make the world readable. That same rule keeps Fantasia remarkable. Its readable world is in the mind’s eye always mutating narratives that first unleashed the artists’ imagination—and opens up audiences forever. Its standard of color and motion are evident even in The Illusionist’s soft pastels and humid neutrals. Fantasia is still a work of art to learn from and aim toward.