The Illusionist

18/11/2025

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In The Illusionist, there are images of Paris and of London, of Sacre Coeur and the Houses of Parliament, but most of the film is set in Scotland, especially in Edinburgh, and Sylvain Chomet, with his animated team (working from a Jacques Tati script), appears to give to these images a loving care that takes animation into the expressive. This can be difficult to do without the very thing that makes cinema such a poignant form:  film records a moment of reality, which is changed by the weight of time accumulating beyond it. When we look at Maggie Smith in the Edinburgh-set The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, we aren’t just watching Brodie in her prime, but Smith as well, a woman well-known as a much older one in various films and TV series, and now, of course, no longer alive. Edinburgh in the film will have aged too; shops will no longer be there, businesses will have closed down, and others will have opened up. Yet part of older films’ capacity to move us resides a little in knowing that times have changed and we are watching people no longer young, perhaps no longer alive, and places that have been transformed not because the director has set a film made in the 1960s in the 1930s (though The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie does), but because time itself has altered the experience. Watching Jean Brodie today, far more time has passed between then and now than between those thirty years.
      An animated film doesn’t usually have quite the same concerns as it exists in the atemporal world of drawing rather than the temporal world of recorded reality. Yet few films are more suffused with longing, loss, and obsolescence than The Illusionist, based on a script by Jacques Tati. If many an animated work makes us think of worlds different from our own, where cats can talk, dogs dance, and humans can defy gravity, The Illusionist, for all its caricatural creations, wants to offer a world suffused with the real. The magic it presents is contained by a harshness it insists on showing. Here we have a magician, Tatischeff, who gets fired in Paris, tries his luck in London, ends up performing at a country home where he meets an amiable, drunken Scot, and accepts his invitation to the Highlands. What the film shows is a man out of his time, still trying to find his place in the world, exemplified by arriving on the Western Isles at the same time as electricity. It is clear which one the locals are more excited by: current is more current than Tatischeff.
Perhaps Tatischeff is more a failure than a loser, if we distinguish the two by saying a failure is one who tries to do the work well but society cares little to acknowledge it, and a loser, someone who wants nothing more than to succeed but doesn’t manage to do so. The failure is all about the work; the loser is all about success. The loser will do anything to succeed and possesses no principles; the failure tries to do their job well, but might realise they are out of their time.
      When in London, Tatischeff performs after a rock ’n’ roll band. For the band, the theatre is full, the audience ecstatic; after Tatischeff takes to the stage, there are only two people in the auditorium. The film cuts to the theatre exterior, and everyone is now outside hoping to get a peek at Billy and the Britoons. Rock ’n’ roll has arrived, and the magic has moved on, channeled through a new musical form, rather than by pulling rabbits out of hats and with numerous tricks up one’s sleeves. Tatischeff is not alone in his failure. When he comes to Edinburgh, he meets a suicidal clown, an alcoholic and eventually homeless ventriloquist, and projects his hopes onto a young woman whom he met while in the Hebrides. Alice followed him onto the boat, and he takes her to the city with him. With what little money he has, he buys her clothes, and she moves from being a poorly attired cleaner in a rural hotel to a young woman who falls in love with a boy her own age. Tatischeff sees he is no longer so important to her life and exits their tiny apartment, leaving a note: magicians do not exist. He is probably more important to her than he realises, with the film showing us first her reaction to the note before we know what it says. Alice looks dismayed, perhaps a little by the absence of magic, but more surely by the absence of this man she seems to have loved at least a little like a father. The magic he showed her wasn’t only in the party tricks he offered but in gifts too: including a white fur-lined coat dress and white high-heels, a dress and gloves. To purchase them, he has undergone humiliation: taking a job as a mechanic when he can’t even work out how to drive a car, and later, in Jenner’s store, miming behind the window the items people can buy.
By the end of the film, it is as though, while a failure, he sees in Alice the chance of success, at least on her own terms. She seeks love and the good things in life, and the film carefully balances her material wants with her consideration towards others. She makes soup for the clown and the ventriloquist, and Alice dutifully tidies up, cooks, and cleans the little apartment she shares with Tatischeff. She appears a decent soul, but a different beast from the magician, and while he is becoming obsolete, she is beginning to bloom as the film crosscuts between scenes of Alice and her new boyfriend, and Tatischeff preparing to leave Edinburgh. He sees her and the young man and hides in the Cameo Cinema (where Tati’s Mon Oncle is screening) so that they don’t spot him, passes up a steep close, the Vennel Steps, and sees the ventriloquist, now an alcoholic beggar. He also releases his much-loved and troublesome rabbit up on Arthur’s Seat.
    We make much of the locations in this passage because we believe they are an important aspect of the film, perhaps paradoxically so. Chomet says “…I don't like to invent places, you know. I prefer to sketch what I'm watching and I was in Scotland at that time, so I was inside the backgrounds. And Edinburgh is a very important character.” (Animation World Network) Tati’s script from decades earlier proposed a non-animated Prague as its chief locational setting, but as an animated work, Chomet creates an unusual mix of documentary and hand-drawn. It is as though he wished to give to animation the realism it usually eschews, even if, of course, Chomet absorbs the caricatural as he shows Tatischeff with legs almost twice the length of his torso, an opera singer almost as wide as she is tall, and a chanteuse so willowy she almost disappears in profile.
Yet the locations are not exaggerated even if we might find the images metonymically obvious, as they draw on expected summation: Sacre Coeur, Big Ben, the White Cliffs of Dover, Battersea Power Station, misty lochs, and steam ferry boats. Yet if the characters are broadly drawn, and many of the locations predictable, its presentation of Edinburgh is astonishingly specific. When we see Tatischeff climb up the Vennel Steps, we can see at the top a little of George Heriot’s school. The Cameo Cinema, Jenners, and other Edinburgh landmarks are carefully reproduced. The film doesn’t only want to suggest the obsolescence of character, but also the precarity of place: that transformations don’t only happen to people, but to cities as well. And yet perhaps Edinburgh changes at a slower pace than most capitals, and that a city utterly transformed wouldn’t quite allow for the complex nostalgia Chomet insists upon. This is where minor changes can make us all the more aware of time, rather than a radical metamorphosis that hides the old.  
     And yet while we might expect this from a film that uses real locations, or at the very least films that impress upon us that the places where it shoots are the places they purport to be (even if a little research or careful attention to the image reveals the scenes were shot in a studio, or with one city filling in for another), how does this work within the context of an animated movie? Strictly speaking ,none of this exists except as a drawing, and nobody watching the film is likely to confuse the real Edinburgh with the one sketched by the animators. Nevertheless, Chomet understands that if a film is recreated with such detail, emotionally, the reality of the city and its animated embodiment can be one and the same. When Tatischeff releases his rabbit, the film no doubt moves us partly because of the advantage animation has in making animals vivid and often anthropomorphic, as it insists on human attributes in the nonhuman. Even if, unlike in that most famous of animated lagamorphic works, Watership Down, the rabbit doesn’t speak, the film achieves an anthropomorphic equality as humans don’t do so either. As in Tati’s work, characters make noises but don’t really talk.
But even more, we are moved by the shot that retreats from the rabbit and encompasses the city, a sweeping image that takes in the Crags, Arthur’s Seat, the Balmoral clock tower, the Scott Monument, Waverley Bridge and, too, the castle. It is as though form and content have become beautifully blended, with the film offering a profound theme within an ostensibly simple tale. We know, watching it, that while Edinburgh has changed in some ways, its archaic status is chiefly intact. What is more obsolescent are the very tools that have been used in recreating this city. Tatischeff claims that magic has disappeared, but the work itself is a piece of magic, saying that the animator’s craft, like the magicians’, can be kept alive with enough care and consideration. It makes the film a devastatingly sensitive work, as we may find ourselves as moved by the effort that has gone into hand-drawing the city into a feature film, as by the terribly sad story of a magician who feels he has no longer any purpose in his life.  

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Illusionist

In The Illusionist, there are images of Paris and of London, of Sacre Coeur and the Houses of Parliament, but most of the film is set in Scotland, especially in Edinburgh, and Sylvain Chomet, with his animated team (working from a Jacques Tati script), appears to give to these images a loving care that takes animation into the expressive. This can be difficult to do without the very thing that makes cinema such a poignant form:  film records a moment of reality, which is changed by the weight of time accumulating beyond it. When we look at Maggie Smith in the Edinburgh-set The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, we aren’t just watching Brodie in her prime, but Smith as well, a woman well-known as a much older one in various films and TV series, and now, of course, no longer alive. Edinburgh in the film will have aged too; shops will no longer be there, businesses will have closed down, and others will have opened up. Yet part of older films’ capacity to move us resides a little in knowing that times have changed and we are watching people no longer young, perhaps no longer alive, and places that have been transformed not because the director has set a film made in the 1960s in the 1930s (though The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie does), but because time itself has altered the experience. Watching Jean Brodie today, far more time has passed between then and now than between those thirty years.
      An animated film doesn’t usually have quite the same concerns as it exists in the atemporal world of drawing rather than the temporal world of recorded reality. Yet few films are more suffused with longing, loss, and obsolescence than The Illusionist, based on a script by Jacques Tati. If many an animated work makes us think of worlds different from our own, where cats can talk, dogs dance, and humans can defy gravity, The Illusionist, for all its caricatural creations, wants to offer a world suffused with the real. The magic it presents is contained by a harshness it insists on showing. Here we have a magician, Tatischeff, who gets fired in Paris, tries his luck in London, ends up performing at a country home where he meets an amiable, drunken Scot, and accepts his invitation to the Highlands. What the film shows is a man out of his time, still trying to find his place in the world, exemplified by arriving on the Western Isles at the same time as electricity. It is clear which one the locals are more excited by: current is more current than Tatischeff.
Perhaps Tatischeff is more a failure than a loser, if we distinguish the two by saying a failure is one who tries to do the work well but society cares little to acknowledge it, and a loser, someone who wants nothing more than to succeed but doesn’t manage to do so. The failure is all about the work; the loser is all about success. The loser will do anything to succeed and possesses no principles; the failure tries to do their job well, but might realise they are out of their time.
      When in London, Tatischeff performs after a rock ’n’ roll band. For the band, the theatre is full, the audience ecstatic; after Tatischeff takes to the stage, there are only two people in the auditorium. The film cuts to the theatre exterior, and everyone is now outside hoping to get a peek at Billy and the Britoons. Rock ’n’ roll has arrived, and the magic has moved on, channeled through a new musical form, rather than by pulling rabbits out of hats and with numerous tricks up one’s sleeves. Tatischeff is not alone in his failure. When he comes to Edinburgh, he meets a suicidal clown, an alcoholic and eventually homeless ventriloquist, and projects his hopes onto a young woman whom he met while in the Hebrides. Alice followed him onto the boat, and he takes her to the city with him. With what little money he has, he buys her clothes, and she moves from being a poorly attired cleaner in a rural hotel to a young woman who falls in love with a boy her own age. Tatischeff sees he is no longer so important to her life and exits their tiny apartment, leaving a note: magicians do not exist. He is probably more important to her than he realises, with the film showing us first her reaction to the note before we know what it says. Alice looks dismayed, perhaps a little by the absence of magic, but more surely by the absence of this man she seems to have loved at least a little like a father. The magic he showed her wasn’t only in the party tricks he offered but in gifts too: including a white fur-lined coat dress and white high-heels, a dress and gloves. To purchase them, he has undergone humiliation: taking a job as a mechanic when he can’t even work out how to drive a car, and later, in Jenner’s store, miming behind the window the items people can buy.
By the end of the film, it is as though, while a failure, he sees in Alice the chance of success, at least on her own terms. She seeks love and the good things in life, and the film carefully balances her material wants with her consideration towards others. She makes soup for the clown and the ventriloquist, and Alice dutifully tidies up, cooks, and cleans the little apartment she shares with Tatischeff. She appears a decent soul, but a different beast from the magician, and while he is becoming obsolete, she is beginning to bloom as the film crosscuts between scenes of Alice and her new boyfriend, and Tatischeff preparing to leave Edinburgh. He sees her and the young man and hides in the Cameo Cinema (where Tati’s Mon Oncle is screening) so that they don’t spot him, passes up a steep close, the Vennel Steps, and sees the ventriloquist, now an alcoholic beggar. He also releases his much-loved and troublesome rabbit up on Arthur’s Seat.
    We make much of the locations in this passage because we believe they are an important aspect of the film, perhaps paradoxically so. Chomet says “…I don't like to invent places, you know. I prefer to sketch what I'm watching and I was in Scotland at that time, so I was inside the backgrounds. And Edinburgh is a very important character.” (Animation World Network) Tati’s script from decades earlier proposed a non-animated Prague as its chief locational setting, but as an animated work, Chomet creates an unusual mix of documentary and hand-drawn. It is as though he wished to give to animation the realism it usually eschews, even if, of course, Chomet absorbs the caricatural as he shows Tatischeff with legs almost twice the length of his torso, an opera singer almost as wide as she is tall, and a chanteuse so willowy she almost disappears in profile.
Yet the locations are not exaggerated even if we might find the images metonymically obvious, as they draw on expected summation: Sacre Coeur, Big Ben, the White Cliffs of Dover, Battersea Power Station, misty lochs, and steam ferry boats. Yet if the characters are broadly drawn, and many of the locations predictable, its presentation of Edinburgh is astonishingly specific. When we see Tatischeff climb up the Vennel Steps, we can see at the top a little of George Heriot’s school. The Cameo Cinema, Jenners, and other Edinburgh landmarks are carefully reproduced. The film doesn’t only want to suggest the obsolescence of character, but also the precarity of place: that transformations don’t only happen to people, but to cities as well. And yet perhaps Edinburgh changes at a slower pace than most capitals, and that a city utterly transformed wouldn’t quite allow for the complex nostalgia Chomet insists upon. This is where minor changes can make us all the more aware of time, rather than a radical metamorphosis that hides the old.  
     And yet while we might expect this from a film that uses real locations, or at the very least films that impress upon us that the places where it shoots are the places they purport to be (even if a little research or careful attention to the image reveals the scenes were shot in a studio, or with one city filling in for another), how does this work within the context of an animated movie? Strictly speaking ,none of this exists except as a drawing, and nobody watching the film is likely to confuse the real Edinburgh with the one sketched by the animators. Nevertheless, Chomet understands that if a film is recreated with such detail, emotionally, the reality of the city and its animated embodiment can be one and the same. When Tatischeff releases his rabbit, the film no doubt moves us partly because of the advantage animation has in making animals vivid and often anthropomorphic, as it insists on human attributes in the nonhuman. Even if, unlike in that most famous of animated lagamorphic works, Watership Down, the rabbit doesn’t speak, the film achieves an anthropomorphic equality as humans don’t do so either. As in Tati’s work, characters make noises but don’t really talk.
But even more, we are moved by the shot that retreats from the rabbit and encompasses the city, a sweeping image that takes in the Crags, Arthur’s Seat, the Balmoral clock tower, the Scott Monument, Waverley Bridge and, too, the castle. It is as though form and content have become beautifully blended, with the film offering a profound theme within an ostensibly simple tale. We know, watching it, that while Edinburgh has changed in some ways, its archaic status is chiefly intact. What is more obsolescent are the very tools that have been used in recreating this city. Tatischeff claims that magic has disappeared, but the work itself is a piece of magic, saying that the animator’s craft, like the magicians’, can be kept alive with enough care and consideration. It makes the film a devastatingly sensitive work, as we may find ourselves as moved by the effort that has gone into hand-drawing the city into a feature film, as by the terribly sad story of a magician who feels he has no longer any purpose in his life.  

© Tony McKibbin