Late great auteur Jacques Tati, the creator of (and now indistinguishable from) his alter ego Monsieur Hulot, never filmed his script The Illusionist (penned sometime in the ‘60s or ‘70s), and it remained unrealised until a few years back when Sylvain Chomet, the charmingly odd French-Scottish animation master behind The Triplets Of Belleville, set about turning it into this winningly old-fashioned, hand-drawn piece that’s about as sad as comedies get. The unnamed Illusionist, who deliberately looks a lot like Hulot, can’t get a gig performing his amazing magic tricks in 1959 Paris, and when he accepts an invitation from a drunken, kilted Scotsman to perform in his favourite pub our protagonist meets young Alice, with whom he travels to Edinburgh (and please note that there’s nothing sinisterly sexual going on here). The Illusionist hopes that he can be booked as part of vaudeville evenings, a style of entertainment on the decline by this time, but instead is forced to try other impersonal jobs, as Alice begins to doubt his seemingly supernatural powers.

Gorgeous to behold and at times painfully moving, it’s all too easy to see why Tati had trouble getting this one made with live-action and Chomet’s animated version hasn’t proved as popular as Triplets: it demonstrates conclusively that the world sometimes isn’t magical.

Mad Dog Bradley

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