Has The Giant Killer Finally Arrived?

For the last several years, I have been nearly endlessly fascinated by the film industry’s attempts to duplicate the astonishing success of Pixar’s animated offerings. In fact, so obsessed have I become that I used a significant portion of my “Predictions for 2010” entry to discuss the remote change that someone might finally topple the 800lb gorilla in the animation room:

Someone’s going to take down the Pixar Goliath one of these days. Will this year be the one? Probably not. But the gap is definitely closing…

Somewhere in that masterpiece of indecisiveness, I hit upon something right. This definitely wasn’t the year. Up took home a well-deserved little golden statuette for its troubles, and the rest of the industry were relegated once again to “keeping up with the Lasseters.”

Over the past few months, however, a serious contender has emerged, eager to play the role of spoiler in Pixar’s previously inevitable February victory parade: The Illusionist (L’illusionniste). (Sorry, the Russian trailer is the only one I can find so far. And it might not be around for that long, either.)

Here are a few reasons why this may a particularly fortuitous films when it comes to slaying the Pixar dragon:

1. Sylvain Chomet, the French mastermind/maniac directing the film is the man responsible for the most serious challenge mounted against Pixar to date. His Triplets of Belleville (Les triplettes de Belleville) gave Finding Nemo a genuine run for its money in 2003, displaying an extraordinary visual flare and musical joie de vivre before eventually succumbing to an obscure and under-developed story line.

2. Chomet’s inspiration and collaborator on the film is a man whose work has already netted him an Oscar, and whose name is regularly mentioned when the title “Greatest Director of All Time” is being thrown about: Jacques Tati. Tati, who passed away in 1982, wrote and directed Mon Oncle, winner of the Academy’s award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1959. Tati, more than a little Allen-like in the way in which he wrote himself so unabashedly into his films, was a bit of a “Johnny One-Note.” But what a charming note it was. He was fascinated (and troubled) by the inexorable advance of modernity, particularly as manifested by modernist architecture. The recurring character of Monsieur Hulot — Tati’s alter-ego — is very much on display in that Russian trailer, though descriptions of the film seem more inclined to describe its main character as Tati himself:

Those who have been following the project will already know the reason for the newfound calm in Chomet’s quirk. The Illusionist is based on a previously unfilmed script by the late comic master Jacques Tati, and the film plays as a fascinating across-the-decades collaboration between two distinct voices (though given their shared preference for amusingly garbled dialogue, perhaps “distinct” isn’t the word) of French comedy: the tangling of Tati’s genial situational humor with Chomet’s more extravagant flights of fancy proves mutually enhancing.

3. Pixar’s entry for next year’s awards isn’t even a sequel; it’s a threequel. And while the masterminds at Pixar have shown that they’re more than capable of coming up with new ideas, a twice-removed story might be just what the Academy Illuminate need to “take ’em down a peg or two.” (And there’s always the “hand-drawn vs. CGI” snobs to keep in mind, as well. I count myself amongst that number, in fact. There’s something about hand-drawn animation that gives me warm-fuzzies, even to this day.)

The stars are aligning. But they’ll need to align a lot more if my prediction is ever to come true.