In the hand-drawn period pieces that have earned the French animator Sylvain Chomet international acclaim, the cartoony characters don’t speak. Their bodies tell the story.
But for his first animated feature in 15 years, “A Magnificent Life,” out in U.S. theaters on Friday, Chomet’s drawings deliver plenty of lines. “I won’t ever do a film with dialogue again,” he said in a recent video interview from Auvergne, in central France. “I’ve done this one, and it’s about Marcel Pagnol, so it needed to have dialogue.”
The animated biopic celebrates Pagnol, the French playwright, filmmaker and author who immortalized the working class of the Provence region in his vast oeuvre throughout the 20th century. Though it’s certainly Chomet’s most verbose outing, the new film preserves his singular style of caricatured figures in exquisitely detailed backgrounds that earned him four Oscar nominations, including for “The Illusionist” (2010) and “The Triplets of Belleville” (2003).
Nicolas Pagnol, the artist’s grandson, said he had watched “The Triplets of Belleville,” in which a mother tries to save her son from the mafia with the help of a trio of vaudeville performers, “perhaps 20 times.” He approached Chomet with the intention of working together on a rather traditional documentary about his grandfather’s multifaceted creative life, which would have blended archival footage with some historical re-enactments in animation.
Chomet, 62, was interested, but favored a different approach. “I said, ‘Let’s do the opposite,’” he recalled. “Let’s do an animated film, and we’ll use some live-action excerpts from the films of Marcel Pagnol.”
Like many in France, Chomet knew Pagnol from his books. He first encountered Pagnol in the pages of the autobiographical “My Father’s Glory,” which records some childhood memories as a 10-year-old on vacation with his parents. “I was that age when I read that,” Chomet said. “This little boy was kind of my friend, and I found his adventures great.”
That boyhood connection manifests in “A Magnificent Life.” Chomet uses a whimsical conversation between the adult Pagnol and his childhood self as the movie’s framing device.
That Pagnol never surrendered his ability for wonder and curiosity resonated deeply with Chomet. “When I was a child, I wanted to make people laugh with my drawings,” Chomet said. “I’m quite faithful to the child I was, because I actually became what I wanted to be.”
Years ago, he considered making a similar film about Victor Hugo, the author of “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame” and “Les Misérables,” but after doing some research, he found Hugo’s life uneventful. “He just sat and wrote,” Chomet said. Pagnol, on the other hand, started out in the theater, then moved on to cinema when talking pictures came in, and lived through World War II.
For Chomet, that was a story worth telling.
Nicolas Pagnol, who knew his grandfather only via his writings and anecdotes from his grandmother Jacqueline Pagnol, said that “A Magnificent Life” was not a hagiography, but an “accurate portrayal” of a man who had “some dark parts of his character.”
Watching the movie was “the first time I saw my grandfather and my grandmother together,” Nicolas said. “It’s very special, because the moment you accept the animation, it becomes more realistic than if it was live action.”
Because these characters are based on real people and exchange substantial dialogue, Chomet changed his approach to animation. To capture the physicality of people engaged in conversation and how their clothes affect their movement, Chomet shot reference material for every scene with actors wearing period-appropriate outfits.
“A Magnificent Life” also reaffirms Chomet’s predilection for narratives set in the mid-20th century. “Since the late ’70s or ’80s, there’s no more beauty,” he said. “There’s a lot of ugliness in the world, and no more nice design. I prefer that period, because it was more authentic.”
His recurrent affinity for protagonists who are storytellers or performers is also on display. “I like artists when they are quite pathetic,” Chomet said. “I like the idea of losers as characters. They’re much more interesting than superheroes.” With “The Illusionist,” for example, he made a emotionally delicate and humorous portrait of a magician struggling to get work that was inspired by another real-life entertainer, Jacques Tati.
And while he would never call his latest subject a loser, Chomet said that some of Pagnol’s characters fit that profile, like Aimable, the bread-maker whose wife abruptly abandons him in Pagnol’s film “The Baker’s Wife.”
Chomet said that part of the reason he had stepped away from animation for so long was to spend time with his children while they were young. That was on top of the challenge of financing films and finding hand-drawn animators who meet his standards.
But he’s back for good now, he said.
His next project, already in the works, is a spinoff of “The Triplets of Belleville.” Based on a story that Chomet wrote over two decades ago, the new film will follow the triplets as they visit their 100-year-old father, who doesn’t know that they sidestepped conventional careers and became cabaret singers. For his birthday, they are telling him the truth.
“It has the same feeling as my previous ‘Triplets’ film,” Chomet explained. “It’s completely mad, and it’s quite a baroque movie with brand-new, very cartoony characters. I’m going back to the basics, back to silent movies, because they are automatically universal.”
When asked if there were any recent animated films he’s enjoyed, Chomet pointed to Pixar’s “Wall-E” as a good example. (It came out in 2008.) Most 3-D computer animation is indistinguishable to him, he said. And although he enjoys Japanese animation, he said that other filmmakers were copying the Japanese style instead of developing their own.
“Globalization is basically having no taste in anything anymore,” he said. “Hand-drawn animation should still be full of different styles.”
“It’s really sad,” Chomet added, but then he smiled. “I’m going to carry on doing my films, because at least I’ll be very original.”
The post A Master of Animation Is Back, With a ‘Magnificent’ Story appeared first on New York Times.
