SYNOPSIS: In “A Magnificent Life,” a new animated film now playing in theatres, looks at acclaimed playwright, novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol.
CAST: Laurent Lafitte, Géraldine Pailhas, Matt Berry. Directed by Sylvain Chomet.
REVIEW: “A Magnificent Life” is something you don’t see often. An animated biopic, it’s the story of playwright, novelist and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol, one of the giants of 20th century French culture.
“The Triplets of Belleville” writer/director Sylvain Chomet assembles a loving portrait of Pagnol, beginning the story at a low moment in the subject’s life. Pagnol is 6o years old, struggling with his own relevance and his latest work, writing a collection of stories from his “magnificent life” for Elle magazine.
Feeling defeated by his faulty memory, his memoir begins to take shape when he is visited by an unusual muse, his 10-year-old self who magically appears to guide him through the vagaries of his memory. Playfully, Marcel pokes and prods the older man to write about success and failure, and his hard-scrabble life growing up in Marseilles.
Chomet’s beautiful hand-drawn animation (with minor digital tinkering) is the star of “A Magnificent Life.” Detailed, Chomet takes a painterly approach to the work, which stands in slight contrast to the more whimsical look and character movement of the jazz age “The Triplets of Belleville.”
He’s opted for a more realistic look but doesn’t forget the mischievousness that make his films memorable. Any movie with a magical manifestation of the main character’s youth is bound to have a sense of fun, but that spark is also demonstrated by a silent-film sequence, complete with intertitles and the story’s interchangeable use of theatrical, cinematic and literary devices to tell the tale. It’s engaging, even if the story itself is a bit Wikipedia in its approach.
“A Magnificent Life” has one perplexing element. Much is made of Pagnol’s insistence on using the Marseilles accent in his work, despite producer’s concerns that general audiences wouldn’t be able to understand the dialect. Thing is, the accents here are all pretty much the same, with no discernable difference for Pagnol’s lilting “accent du Midi.”
What “A Magnificent Life” lacks in adventurous storytelling it makes up in warmth and visual invention as it blends magic realism with reality.
SYNOPSIS: Based on Peter Brown’s award-winning, #1 New York Times bestseller of the same name, “The Wild Robot,” a new animated film starring the voices of Lupita Nyong’o and Pedro Pascal, and now playing in theatres, features a shipwrecked robot named ROZZUM unit 7134— “Roz” for short—who develops a parental bond with an orphaned gosling. “A ROZZUM always completes its task,” she says.
CAST: The Wild Robot Lupita Nyong’o, Pedro Pascal, Kit Connor, Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara, Matt Berry, Ving Rhames. Directed by Chris Sanders.
REVIEW: The animated “The Wild Robot” will put you in the mind of “The Iron Giant,” “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “WALL-E,” but carves out its own, unique, rewarding space. Brimming with compassion, humor and kindness, it’s an exciting adventure story with a big, beating heart.
It’s a deceptively simple film. Roz’s sleek character design and the unpretentious premise of finding your logical, not necessarily biological family, are brought to life by the power of a great voice cast, inventive animation and director Chris Sanders’s vivid imagination.
Roz (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) is a bigger BB-8 style robot, mechanical and, when we first meet her, mission driven with no visible signs of compassion behind her crystal blue electronic eyes. At first the matriarchal relationship with the gosling named Brightbill (voice of Kit Connor) is a job, nothing more. “A ROZZUM always completes its task,” she says.
But as time passes a warmth appears in her eyes and voice as Nyong’o reveals the bot’s hidden humanity. She’s less Siri and more a mother. “Sometimes to survive,” she says, “we must become more than we were programmed to be.”
Nyong’o does the heavy lifting, shifting Roz from automaton to sentient being, but she is supported by a terrific cast.
Catherine O’Hara brings comedic relief as frazzled possum mother Pinktail. As Fink, a fox who undergoes a transformation from predator to patriarchal figure, fan favorite Pedro Pascal brings sly humor and, as robot Vontra, Oscar nominees Stephanie Hsu is the icy-but-wacky voice of authoritarianism.
“The Wild Robot” is a wonderful film for the whole family. It has humor, adventure and uplift, but mostly, it has heart and the makings of a classic. “Was this task completed to your satisfaction?” Roz asks several times in the film. The answer is an emphatic yes.
