A Magnificent Life

From the director of THE TRIPLETS OF BELLEVILLE, this film follows the life of Pagnol, a playwright, novelist, and filmmaker who grew up in a middle-class household in Marseille and became one of the world's most inventive and prolific artists from the 1930's to the 1950's.

Review from the New York Times

An animated biopic of the French filmmaker, novelist, and playwright Marcel Pagnol, “A Magnificent Life (Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol)” is doused in the ocher and olive hues of Provence, the southern region where Pagnol was born in 1895 and that he immortalized throughout his career.

The director Sylvain Chomet (“The Triplets of Belleville”), an art-house animator with a powerful nostalgic streak, tries to cover full breadth of Pagnol’s life: his working-class childhood and the death of his mother; his rise in the theater and move to Paris; his transition to cinema and the creation of his own studio; his troubles with Nazi leaders during the German occupation of France. And then some.

There’s more to love in the details than in this overloaded sprint through history, which the film frames from the perspective of an aging Pagnol as he talks to a phantom version of his younger self and attempts to begin writing his memoirs. Live-action scenes from Pagnol’s films, like “Marius” (1931) and “Fanny” (1932), are sometimes included in the animation, and other flourishes — a scratchy silent movie reel and an Art Deco-style interlude — convey the thrills of an era of countless artistic revolutions.

Read the rest of the review from Beatrice Loayza here...