Voices: Jean-Claude Donda (the Illusionist), Eilidh Rankin (Alice)
Director/Editor/Music: Sylvain Chomet
Producers: Bob Last, Sally Chomet
Production co:  Django Films, Ciné B, France 3 Cinéma
Screenplay: Sylvain Chomet. Based on a script by Jacques Tati
REVIEWS

"This animated classic from the director of The Triplets of Belleville, tells the sweet, funny tale of a magician travelling in Scotland and the impressionable young girl who adopts him as her dad.  Based on an unfilmed script by comic genius Jacques Tati, it’s the tale of a music hall magician who travels (with truculent white rabbit) from Paris to London to Scotland in pursuit of ever-smaller stages for his one-man show.  Arriving on a far-flung Scottish isle on the very day that electricity first goes live, he finds himself playing adopted father to a sweetly wilful, impressionable young woman who thinks his magic is real.

​Set largely in Edinburgh in the late 50s, as vaudeville dwindles and rock ’n’ roll and television surge forth, The Illusionist is like Triplets’ wistful twin, precise and drily comic in the manner of Tati, but glowing with nostalgia for the antics of the old variety entertainers.  It’s also an exquisitely rendered declaration of love for Scotland and for Edinburgh in particular.  Chomet fell for the city when he presented Triplets at the Edinburgh Film Festival and settled there soon after.  This film is steeped in its Georgian loveliness and Gothic splendours, the mists and shifting lights and shadows."

— Bill Gosden, NZ International Film Festival 2010
FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Nelson 
Thursday, 1 March, 6:00pm

Dunedin 
Wednesday, 14 March, 7:30pm

Wellington 
Monday, 26 March, 6:15pm

Whanganui 
Monday, 9 April, 7:00pm

Palmerston North
Monday, 16 April, 6:00pm

Canterbury
Monday, 23 April, 7:30pm

Queenstown 
Tuesday, 8 May, 8:15pm

Waitati 
Tuesday, 15 May, 8:00pm

New Plymouth 
​Wednesday, 30 May, 6:00pm
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