Sylvain Chomet draws people as shapes first, bulging and knobbly and never pretty, then lets them carry a whole film without a word. When drawing and feeling meet, as in The Triplets of Belleville, nobody in animation is quite like him.
Fi1m perspective
Three old women in a slum flat drop dynamite into a pond, gather the frogs that float to the top, and serve them as soup, as skewers and as lollipops. Nobody says anything. Nobody in a Chomet cartoon says much; the drawings do the talking, and the people are all noses and jowls and knees. "To me, it's very boring to draw pretty characters," he said in 2003, and he has kept his word. His people are shapes before they are characters, which was Jacques Tati's method too, and Chomet has never hidden the debt.
He came out of the Angoulême comic-strip school in 1987, which explains the pen, and spent his early years animating in London and on commercials while drawing comics with Nicolas de Crécy, who also designed backgrounds for him. The short The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1997) took years to finish and set the pattern: an old person, a city, appetite, no words. The Triplets of Belleville (2003) made his name, and The Illusionist (2010), built from a script Tati never filmed, paid the debt in full. In between he founded a studio in Edinburgh, Django Films, in 2004, and later saw it dismantled. Then he put the pencils down for a long stretch, for a segment of Paris, je t'aime (2006) and a live-action feature, Attila Marcel (2013), before coming back to animation with A Magnificent Life (2025), a biopic of Marcel Pagnol and his first animated feature in fifteen years.
What works in Triplets is what works in all of him: comedy and sadness drawn with the same line. Evgeni Tomov's production design gives France the colours of a stained tablecloth and Belleville the grey-green of a fish tank, and every car and building bulges. The moment that got us was smaller than any of that. The grandmother, who never once says she loves the boy, hires a boat and crosses an ocean after him, and the film simply lets her do it. We were moved, and the film had not asked us to be.
What does not work is the pen when it is pointed outward. Belleville is a European's cartoon of America, fat people and hamburgers, and the joke is good for five minutes and runs for the rest of the film. The middle slackens; Chomet is a better observer of rooms than of cities. The reviews so far say A Magnificent Life is more conventional than the early films and loses momentum trying to cover a whole life, and we can see how a man who finds pretty characters boring might struggle with the tidy shape of a great man's biography. We have not seen it yet. Start with the frogs.
Biography
Sylvain Chomet is a French comic writer, animator and film director. Born on 10 November 1963 in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, he studied art and graduated from the comic-strip studio at Angoulême in 1987. He began publishing comics in the mid-1980s, often collaborating with Nicolas de Crécy, and later worked as a freelance animator in London on commercials.
Chomet’s first animated short, The Old Lady and the Pigeons (1997), won the Grand Prize at Annecy, a BAFTA and a Cartoon d’Or, and received an Oscar nomination. His feature debut The Triplets of Belleville (2003), which he directed and wrote, was nominated for two Academy Awards. Subsequent features include The Illusionist (2010) and the live-action Attila Marcel (2013). He directed and wrote the animated feature A Magnificent Life (2025).
Chomet has received four Oscar nominations in total and a César Award. He is married to Sally Chomet.
