The Illusionist (2010)

Maybe this movie just doesn’t work for me. There is something off about it that doesn’t appeal to my taste. Don’t get me wrong, this is a very good film, and one that I suggest that you see just for the sake of seeing it, but it is flawed. There just seem to have some things about it that just makes me uncomfortable. The majority of the film has an extremely small amount of dialogue in it (and that isn’t my problem with the film, one of my favorite movies is Wall-E, which has little dialogue as well), and what dialogue is in the film is mostly French. But I wasn’t offered subtitles. When you click the subtitle feature, and someone is talking in French, it just reads-“Talking in French”. And that is irritating. If you’re going to have them talk in a different language, MAKE IT AVAILABLE SO THAT I KNOW WHAT THEY ARE SAYING! When you have that little dialogue, you need to make it available so that a person can tell what they’re saying. I could not really figure out the plot very well. The plot (according to the film’s Wikipedia page) is about a failing magician in Europe 1959, who, while traveling the cities looking for work, comes across a teenage girl who still believes in all the fancies of being a child, almost to the extent of being ignorant. She believes that this man possesses magical powers, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she also believed in the tooth fairy. So the girl follows the illusionist, as he does his best to care for the girl like a daughter, as money falters and the number of jobs he gets becomes lesser and lesser (NOTE: When explaining the plot of this movie to my friends, they made crude jokes, and I had to remind them that this wasn’t a Woody Allen film). The film plays along with this simple premise quite smoothly and gracefully, but the film seems to rely solely on this aspect, making basically a dish that looks graceful, and is light and fluffy, but has no substance to it. But the style of it is extremely nice. The film is wonderful to look at; the animation is spectacular and the music that plays for most of the film is wonderful. But the movie just seems to be lacking in something for me to care about. It is a good film; but you will always realize that you’re watching a movie on your computer (my situation). And for the really good films, you get sucked away into a world of fantasy and magic. Here, you’re just watching a film.
8/10