The Illusionist

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Jay W 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. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 12/02/24 Full Review tim o 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. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member 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... Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 01/13/23 Full Review dane m Like Les Triplettes de Belleville, the animation is mesmerizing. If you're watching on your TV 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. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member Lovely style of animation and a really heartfelt story. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/22/23 Full Review Audience Member 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. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 02/17/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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