Sylvain Chomet, the great French animation filmmaker, started his movie career with a short, The Old Lady And The Pigeons that won a BAFTA, and the Grand Prize at the 1997 Annecy International Animated Film Festival, as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Film. He followed that up in 2003 with two more Oscar nominations including Best Animated Feature for his first full length film, the wildly inventive The Triplets Of Belleville, and in 2010 with another acclaimed animated feature, The Illusionist which was based on an unproduced 1956 Jacques Tati script and featured an animated version of Tati in an emotional story about his relationship with his estranged older daughter. It brought him a fourth Oscar nomination.
He has dabbled in live action as well, but only recently returned to animation, notably last year’s five minute preface to Todd Phillip’s Joker Folie a Deux. Even if the film itself was critically maligned, Chomet’s clever and richly animated opening was much admired. I actually told Warner Bros. they should have separated it out and entered it as a stand-alone animated short for the Oscars. They didn’t but it was another strong indication of the talent of Chomet. In Cannes last month he debuted his first animated feature film in 15 years, A Magnificent Life (French title: Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol), a biopic of the legendary French novelist, playwright, and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol.
It all started as an idea to make a documentary that also included animated sequences, but apparently the animation worked so well, Chomet decided instead to do the whole thing as a fully animated biopic of Pagnol’s life, with actual clips from his films put into the mix and an actor playing Pagnol in voiceover. The result is now also on display also at the Annecy Animated Film Festival where Chomet had his aforementioned first triumph nearly three decades ago.
As you might expect it is a gorgeously designed and animated film, much in the style to which we have seen from Chomet before with realistic renderings of Pagnol and those others from his ‘magnificent’ life. The idea of doing a rather traditional biopic in this form is indeed inspired, especially with the set-up of Pagnol as he attempts to write a memoir but didn’t find inspiration to revisit his past until his younger Marcel-self magically appears as a guide through his emergence into the world and events in his life. From this point the narrative proceeds as a rather by-the-numbers account with his youth in his native Marseille, early tragedy with the loss of his mother, and his beginnings as a playwright, first with some flops but then hitting gold with Topaze, leading to a huge hit with Marius which also led to his first big film success as screenwriter in 1931, followed by Fanny the next year, both directed by others but penned by Pagnol.
Finally he began directing including the final chapter of his “Marseille Trilogy” Cesar in 1936. At this point he also founded his own studio, and actually had the idea to set what essentially were tariffs on his films for distribution abroad (ironically an idea Trump has recently suggested for foreign films coming into America). He would later return to literary pursuits, penning Jean de Florette and Manon Of The Spring (later he would direct a film version of the latter in 1952) , as well as the autobiographical My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle. To show his continuing influence, even after his death in 1974 at age 79, the former two were turned into highly successful films by director Claude Berri in 1986, and the latter pair by Yves Robert in 1990.
Check out the trailer below:
Chomet’s film covers much of this, but it all floats by without much detailed examination, more like a “and then I wrote” sort of format, but certainly we do see how his personal life affected his professional career, with numerous marriages including to Jacqueline Bouvier Pagnol and the tragic death of their 2 year old daughter. His own self doubts about his talent, and vignettes regarding some of his famous actor friends, notably Raimu and Fernandel and more are stuffed into the 90 minute running time. There really isn’t room for everything but I would have liked to spend more time savoring a film like 1935’s Merlusse which has turned out to be one of the most successful in the afterlife of Pagnol, influencing director Alexander Payne’s 2023 English language remake, The Holdovers. I am also a huge fan of the 1961 Warner Bros. remake of Fanny which received five Oscar nominations including Best Picture, and had been based also on the Broadway musical version of Pagnol’s time honored tale (minus the songs in the stage version).
It was the latter film that served as my personal introduction to Pagnol, but no doubt this new movie which Sony Pictures Classics will be releasing stateside in a dubbed English language version (the French version was shown in Cannes) may serve as an introduction to younger audiences who would otherwise look away. It’s not exactly Super Mario Bros-family friendly, but Chomet’s stunning hand drawn animation with its lovely Stefano Bollani musical score gives new reason to celebrate Pagnol and this maginificent life as seen by an admiring artist of a later generation paying deep homage to a master.
Producers are Aton Soumache, Ashargin Poire, Valérie Puech, and Lilian Eche.
Title: A Magnificent Life
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Director/Screenplay: Sylvain Chomet
Cast: Laurent Lafitte (as Marcel Pagnol in French version), Matthew Gravelle (in English Language version).
Running Time: 1 hour and 30 minutes
