Chomet's multiply award-nominated
Les Triplettes de Belleville of 2003 served notice of a singular talent in the animation field, a craftsman harking back to a bygone era of the animated feature as a painstaking labour of love, proceeding not at a pace dictated by the imagined demands of the modern audience for pyrotechnic thrills, but rather with just the rate that the story and characters organically require. So it's a delight to discover that Chomet has painstakingly assembled another work in the same vein with the story of a French stage magician down on his luck in a changing world, who finds eventually himself in a remote Scottish village in his search to make ends meet. There, a starry-eyed young chambermaid latches herself onto him, and the weary illusionist's lot from there on is to try to provide for her too.
This could easily be painfully twee in the wrong hands. You wouldn't trust the laughably overrated fantasist Miyazaki with it, for instance. But instead, there's a palpable bittersweetness running through every scene, every character, which both grounds them in authenticity and yet is delicate enough to not overwhelm the ebullient humour and poetry.
The original screenplay was actually Jacques Tati's: the illusionist is Hulot to every last gesture, but somehow more accessible and less opaque than Tati himself ever was, as if his undoubtedly perceptive ideas had finally found their perfect medium. And it's really quite breathtakingly beautiful, too: a wealth of watercolours freshened up by sparing and inobtrusive CGI. Just see it.
8/10
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