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Wonderful character development!

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Chomet seems to have nailed his style from the days The Triplets of Belleville.He captures Scotland, in particular Edinburgh, so well that memories of walking around Arthur's Seat and the quirky characters found at the fringe festivals came flooding back.The artistry is truly beautiful with mostly hand-drawn animations and limited use of CGI techniques; but the color work, the color work is sublime.Storywise though, it's charming yet a little too melancholic for my tastes but Tati's comedic nuances and the attention to detail had me favor this over Belleville.

This film was nominated for the Academy Award for Animated Feature, losing to Toy Story 3. There will be spoilers ahead:This film uses a script written by Jacques Tati and adapted by Sylvain Chomet. The film displays the strengths/weaknesses of Chomet's other works (Exactly what constitutes a strength or a weakness is variable, depending on the eye of the beholder). The plot is minimal, with just the barest sketch of a story. A stage magician, practicing a craft which is dying out in the late 1950s, finds himself reduced to playing backwater towns and smaller venues, meeting a very naive young girl named Alice in one inn in Scotland. When he leaves, she follows him without his knowledge, popping up on a train, where the magician decides on the spur of the moment to take the girl under his wing.They take a room at a rundown boarding house for lower rung stage acts. The magician sees his opportunities to be a stage act dry up and takes other, less appealing and more degrading work to support them until the girl meets a young man and the two part company and begin separate chapters in their life story. That's the story.Doesn't sound like much, does it? Except that Chomet makes up for the sketchy plot here by his attention to detail in the visual look of the film and the magnificent characterizations of even the most minor characters. The magician's rabbit is enormous and rather ill-tempered, the magician himself (modeled after Tati) is stiff and formal, charming and distant. The girl is industrious and calculating, full of dreams and desires and at the start of her life, filled with hope.Various characters pop up and drop out of the film. The drunken host in a kilt shows up a few times, a popular, noisy and rather silly rock band crosses paths with the magician a couple of times in the film and the down and out stage acts, particularly a trio of acrobats constantly in motion, provide some humor and pathos here and there.The film is visually gorgeous and shows a lot of attention to detail. A train crosses a river on a bridge and you see it's reflection in the water as a waterfowl takes flight. Lights shining through windows cast light and shadow on the interior of rooms and characters. The colors are striking and lush when they should be or dingy and washed out when it's appropriate. It's an animator's film in some ways. It's beautifully executed. The character designs are the type Chomet characteristically uses. Watch through the end of the credits, as there's a nice little scene at the end.This film is available on DVD and Blu Ray and both look very good, with Blu Ray getting a slight edge. This film is most definitely worth seeing. Most Recommended.

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.

This is the animated film that should have won the Oscar it was nominated for in 2011. Unfortunately, the jury chose for -yet another- Pixar blockbuster, not for the originality and poetry of Sylvain Chomet's film. This is an unfair world, but so be it: I am convinced Chomet will get the Oscar some day, if he can keep the level of the Illusionist: a breathtakingly beautiful movie, the best of all animation I have ever seen on the big screen. The rhythm is different from the video-clip-like rhythm of most animation films these days; instead, the slower pace draws our attention on every single significant detail that we would otherwise be unaware of. The references to Jacques Tati as story writer are smoothly integrated. The backgrounds and characters are wonderfully drawn and typical of Chomet's scrupulously detailed and often half romantic, half realist style. I highly recommend this movie to be seen on a big screen, if possible in a theater, for it really deserved to be tasted like a "grand cru", a top ranked French wine.