Pixar released the first “Toy Story” over 30 years ago, and its massive success established a new technical standard. Since then, traditional hand-drawn, cel-based animation has had an increasingly rough time. It’s now harder than ever to get a feature in the classical style, harder still to get it seen by a wide audience. In theory, regulars at the Ink and Paint Club should be overjoyed by “A Magnificent Life,” the first new feature in 15 years from French-born animator and comic book artist Sylvain Chomet. Unfortunately, although every frame is rendered with love, the result is less than meets the eye.
Chomet made his feature directing debut in 2003 with “The Triplets of Belleville,” a critically acclaimed international smash. His follow-up, 2010’s “The Illusionist,” based on an unproduced Jacques Tati script, and built around a Tati stand-in modeled on Tati’s recurring character Monsieur Hulot, got mixed reviews. This site’s founder gave the movie four stars, but The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, a Francophile, called it “a cliché-riddled nostalgia trip,” and there was a behind-the-scenes controversy over whom, exactly, the movie’s daughter was based on. Roger Ebert himself became a participant in the drama when he published a letter from Tati’s grandson complaining about aspects of Chomet’s movie. Since then, many Chomet projects have been announced only to be canceled or go nowhere.
His long-delayed third animated feature, “A Magnificent Life” feels like the second panel in what could become a series of films about French cultural icons. The subject here is the life and work of Marcel Pagnol, the novelist and screenwriter who is perhaps best known internationally for the 1986 epic “Jean de Florette” and “Manon of the Spring,” a two-film, four-hour adaptation of Pagnol’s same-named melodramas about treachery and vengeance in a small town. In terms of adaptation, it’s an odd duck: an animated biopic in which a 60-year old Pagnol (voiced by Laurent Lafitte) struggles to write a memoir because, as he puts it, he has no memories to put in it (a weird assertion on its face), only to have a much younger, intolerably sprightly version of himself spontaneously appear to serve as his guide and muse.
The result is a short and fragmented movie with a stop-and-start rhythm. It’s weighed down by a framing device that is presumably intended to make it feel like something more than a traditional “and then he went here, and then he did this” biopic, but might end up making the viewer wish that Chomet had done the expected thing.
The story starts in 1905, with a then ten-year-old Pagnol living in Marseille and hoping to become an engineer, but gravitating more towards right-brained pursuits such as poetry (he writes verse to his dear grandmother, voiced by Géraldine Pailhas). From there, the film plays out like an account of a long and eventful life as told by an elderly relative who can’t remember which parts of the story are new to the listener and which parts he’s told before and can skip.
The phrase “plot holes” gets thrown around sloppily these days to refer to any narrative element the viewer doesn’t like or approve of, but it fits here. This is a French story, but the script is Swiss cheese. When the young adult Pagnol moves to Paris, where he teaches Latin while becoming a playwright who publishes under a pen name, he has a wife we’ve never met before or even heard of. The wife leaves Pagnol after his successful first play for reasons not clearly elucidated. Then there’s some business about his father disliking his second play and being reluctant to endorse his son’s desire to be a writer, only to have his opinion turn around 180 degrees upon seeing Pagnol’s third play. This is all handled in a span of time better suited to watching Bugs and Daffy trying to one-up each other in a stage show.
Confusion about the story and incredulity at some of the creative choices shouldn’t be the go-to emotions when watching such an unusual motion picture, but they’re the main reactions to “A Magnificent Life,” which really should have been called “Some Bits of a Life That Should Seem Magnificent, But For Whatever Reason, Don’t.” Chomet’s gift for deftly caricatured faces, expressive movement, and clever compositions hasn’t deserted him, and there are many flat-out beautiful bits scattered throughout, but this is altogether a work that’s best appreciated with the sound off, while blasting a playlist of Django Reinhardt’s greatest hits.
