Who's who

Sylvian Chomet is a French comic writer, animator and film director born on the 10 November 1963 in Maisons-Laffitte, Seine-et-Oise (now Yvelines), near Paris. He studied art at high school until he graduated in 1982. Chomet moved to London in 1988 to work as an animator at the Richard Purdum studio. In September of that year, he established a practice, working on commercials for clients such as Principality, Renault, Swinton and Swissair. In addition to his animation career, Chomet created many print comics.

At a young age he was fascinated with art and animation.  In his youth he spent a lot of time on cartoon drawings while others were in normal childhood activities like sports. His skills eventually earned him a diploma in animation from a respected art school in Angouleme, France.  Starting his animation career in 1988, he went to work at the Richard Purdum Studio in London. Despite a reasonable amount of commercial success with his freelance services, Chomet would continue his quest to write and create his own animated features and soon embarked on a project of his own.

Artist style:

Sylvian has hand-drawn and computer-animated technique, possibly creating a framework for a scene in 3D and then adding hand-drawn details. The artist wanted to do things in animation that hadn’t been done before.  He creates for kids. And brings good feelings, have bad guys and good guys, and ends with a moral. But this means there are lots of subjects and things you can’t show, like someone smoking a cigarette for example. With “Belleville”, the aim was to go against that, and do something that wasn’t aimed at kids.

Sylvian used CGI (special visual effects/ computer-generated imagery) to get rid of all the boring stuff. Objects, for example, always take a very long time to animate because they don’t change as they move. Therefore, he used CGI for the cars, the bicycles, the boats and the trains, and it meant the animators had more time for enjoyable elements like the character acting. He also, at times, uses traditional animation. The ‘cell’ is an important innovation to traditional animation, as it allows some parts of each frame to be repeated from frame to frame, thus saving labour. A simple example would be a scene with two characters on screen, one of which is talking and the other standing silently. Since the latter character is not moving, it can be displayed in this scene using only one drawing, on one cel, while multiple drawings on multiple ‘cells’ are used to animate the speaking character. Sylvian would use this at times to save time and speed up the process of his animation.

‘The triplets of Bellville’ is a well-known example of one of Sylvian’s pieces. Like its predecessor “the Old Lady and the Pigeons”, The Triplets of Belleville displays the trademark of an imaginative and unusual style that Chomet was now renowned for. However, at the heart of the film is a touching story of an old woman and her desire to protect and care for her young grandson as she raises him to adulthood. Although still classed as traditoinal animation it is also worthy to note that this was the first time that Chomet chose to integrate computer animation into some of the scenes during the movie.

In addition to this, the illusionist is perhaps his finest work to date. The film tells the tale of a struggling magician as he tries to survive in the world of entertainment which has been changed forever following the post-television era and the emergence of pop culture. After seeing his employment opportunities dry up in his native home of Paris, he tries his luck on the shores of Britain eventually finding himself in Edinburgh, Scotland. Much of the story revolves around the magician’s father-daughter relationship that he develops with a young girl that he meets in the highlands of Scotland. The film and it’s story is a beautiful experience to behold but also achingly sad.

A lot of colour is used in Sylvian’s work and a complex amount of animation is used. He does not restrict his work to children but leaves it to an open audience. He created this in 2D even though animators were using 3D at the time because he says it is harder and more detailed but a 2D animator is someone who can draw ‘classically’, who can draw fast, and someone who knows anatomy. You need to know the motion of animals and humans to make it work, and you need to know how to act as well. He wanted to show his talent and make his work to the best of his ability