Sylvain Chomet has returned.
The French filmmaker’s first animated feature, 2003’s “The Triplets of Belleville,” was nominated for two Academy Awards, Best Animated Feature and Best Original Song. It introduced the world to Chomet’s distinct visual style and playfulness; his traditional, hand-drawn animation felt both timeless and incredibly new.
He followed it up with “The Illusionist” in 2010, based on an unproduced screenplay by famed French comedian and filmmaker Jacques Tati (and featuring an animated version of Tati in the lead role). Since “The Illusionist,” Chomet has been pulled in several directions, including shooting a 2003 live-action feature (“Attila Marcel”) and creating a “Looney Tunes”-style animated prologue for last year’s “Joker: Folie à Deux” that ended up being the best part of the movie.
But now he is back for his first animated feature in 15 years, “A Magnificent Life.”
It’s the story of French novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol as he is visited by a younger version of himself. All the charm and wit of Chomet’s earlier animated work returns, as does his commitment to making something unmistakably French. It’s funny and moving and visually dazzling, even if American audiences have no clue who Marcel Pagnol is.
Chomet said that the idea for the project came from Pagnol’s grandson, Nicolas Pagnol. They initially envisioned the project as a straightforward, live-action biography. “It was supposed to be a standard documentary with a few animated scenes. It turned out to be the exact opposite,” Chomet said.
Soon he had come up with a different, more impressionistic version of a biography, with a clever framing device: The young Marcel drops in on his older self and takes him through his life. “It comes from my own experience,” Chomet said. “The little Sylvain is still alive within me.”
But has making a hand-drawn animated feature become easier or harder in the years since “The Triplets of Belleville?” “More difficult, like everything else in the period we live in,” Chomet said.
The filmmaker is particularly fond of the scene where the characters are rehearsing “Marius,” a play originally performed in 1929 and turned into a movie directed by Alexander Korda (and written by Pagnol) in 1931. The play is about a young man named Marius who works at a café by the sea and dreams of finally romancing Fanny, a girl he’s known since childhood.
“I love the naturalism of the acting,” said the director, who rarely falls into animation’s tendency to overexaggerate. Instead, he loves the small gestures, the subtle frequencies that make a character spring to life.
Chomet is working on his next film, a spin-off of “The Triplets of Belleville.” Let’s just hope it doesn’t take another 15 years.
This story first ran in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
