Wow! Such a good movie.

Overrated and overhyped

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Words cannot express how beautiful this film is, both in visuals and in content.I watched it, stupidly expecting a live action film, but what I got... Well, it's difficult to describe.The animation is the best I've ever seen, I have no idea how they did it, but so often you have to remind yourself that it's not real despite the fact that the art work is stylised.Each shot contains details that only add to the story, and each shot is like a work of art.This is a beautiful film, watch it as soon as you possibly can.

As much as hand-drawn animation is being supplanted by computer animation, there are still artists who know the power of the art form and give us beautiful images that go along with great stories. Sylvain Chomet (LES TRIPLETTES DE BELLEVILLE) has done just that with THE ILLUSIONIST (aka L'ILLUSIONNISTE, and not to be confused with the 2006 Edward Norton film). The story is rather simple. It is about an out-of-work French magician/illusionist who goes to Scotland and meets this young woman who is convinced that his "magic" is real. Over the course of the film, you see a friendship develop between them as his livelihood becomes less viable as a means of support and she comes into her own as a woman. Aiming for subtlety, there is hardly any dialogue (intelligible dialogue, at least) and the images are the primary driver of the story. It's also quite touching and heartfelt. You really feel for this aging man who sees the life he's built for himself as a magician grow smaller and smaller as people now go to the music halls to see rock bands instead of illusionists, ventriloquists and clowns. By the same token, the woman has to discover that the "magic" isn't what it appears to be and, in a sense, grow up. From a technical standpoint, the animation was just beautiful and a sight to behold. Sylvain Chomet has a very distinctive, impressionistic approach to character design that makes each frame look like it could be a watercolor painting. Also worth mentioning is that the film is based on an unpublished script by Jacques Tati. Although I've yet to see anything by him, the comedic sensibility on display here makes me want to do so really soon. When all is said and done, THE ILLUSIONIST is a mature, wonderfully animated film with plenty of humor and heart that every animation fan should see.

I recall the scene where Alice reads a note left for her by the Illusionist and the note said - "The magician does not exist" - I believe that is correct. And for me this is what the entire story is about.The Illusionist did all he could to make Alice happy and as long as she was poorly dressed she was happy to cater to the Illusionist and the other lot of washed up performers living in that apartment building. But when the Illusionist gives her too much it all becomes magic to her. The Illusionist is working himself to death to keep the magic in her life. Then the handsome guy across the street gets her attention - more magic in her life.The other performers are sad and hopeless, all the magic is gone in their lives and the Illusionist cannot be the magic in Alice's life. She still see's the magic in her life but the magician does not exist! His note fails to open her eyes - her life now is an illusion.

I've lost count on how many times I've seen "Les Triplettes de Belleville" (2003). Chomet's sense of beauty as well as of humor are matchlessly cinematic, which is one of the reasons I think he fares so well without allowing dialogue to dictate too much. (It's great, then, to see how he utilizes speech — mostly it's either incomprehensible mumbo jumbo or phonetically mimicking a language, or then it's only few words here and there that are used in the most ordinary situations, carrying little weight.)On the other hand, I don't care for Tati too much at all. For this reason I was very interested to see how this would turn out, since much of this is meant to be his as much as Chomet's.This is a great film, measured by any possible standard. The inexplicable sense of loss, not of death but of time passing, the present fading, an era changing, it's all here. Chomet says so much in so little, and he's at his best here not only in the strokes of surrealism, the insignificantly small moments that resume from time to time; not only these are great, but the actual moments of silence are a wonder. The shot of the empty room and the play of light is his finest moment, and a perfect summa of not only the film but, to some extent, Tati's career, as well, or an account of it, at least.Nowadays we might be tempted to see this as an allegory for the demise of hand-drawn animation. Considering it's Tati's script, that's hardly the case, and I think the film is much richer for it if we see it as a depiction of the demise of silent comedy — when seeing this film let's remember Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton, and what they did. And indeed, remember Tati, too.