angels

Last night we watched Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist, a lovely, fragile thing - as tender as an old man's heart.  The animation is of a water-colored style, given its corners and shapes by thin, hand-drawn lines.  And then there comes a moment so beautiful, subtle, right and startling, my jaw actually dropped and I clapped my hands.  Do not let me spoil it for you:

Our gentle protagonist is in a little boat, nearing the dock of the village where he will perform his magic act.  We see his aged back and small stack of luggage in the boat.  And then, as if the dreamlike animation were in fact there, a couple of drops of water appear on the "lens" of the "camera."  It is an entirely aesthetic moment that sends one's whole mind racing.  A chill ran through me.  I wondered how many people even noticed it - it is there for less than a second.  I look online, and of course viewers do notice it. 

The moment is the second of three feats of special visual magic that exceed even the level of great animation.  The first feat, only a little less great, is that an animation of a magician performing his stage tricks should contain no magic at all.  And yet the magic is there.  It is only the drawing of a rabbit being pulled out of an empty hat.  And yet the viewer is still startled and pleased, as if by a real illusion.  As animation itself naturally is.

The third feat is the peculiar interlocking - deliberately not quite integration - of the hand-drawn with the computer effects that appear now and then to give the ripple of water in a bay, or the dance of a match flame, or the drift of countless feathers caught by a breeze.  The hand-drawn and the computer effects set one another off.  They work together, but not as one.  The effect, again, is to create a world that is meant not to become quite real, but to be artifice: to be seen as illusion.