100 Greatest Animated Shorts / The Old Lady and the Pigeons / Sylvain Chomet
France / 1997
Chomet’s first film takes us on a deliciously engrossing and visually rich feast that is often silly, sometimes nightmarish but never predictable. It concerns a starving and food obsessed Paris gendarme (surely the French Police cant be this poorly paid?) who disguises himself as a pigeon so that the old lady in the park will feed him. After following her home where he is invited in to be fattened by tasty French cuisine, events take some darker and increasingly surreal turns.
Made in the master animator/director’s signature style, which aesthetically is like a super-styled, sugar-free and crunchier version of Disney classics from 1960-75 (the period when the studio’s films were at their most stylised and loose), all sketchy expressive pencil lines and knobbly Milt Kahl-esque hands, except with cuteness abandoned here in favour of grotesquery. This high ambition invites comparison to some of history’s greatest animated features, but the animation, drawing and design here hardly suffer as a consequence.
The ideas on Chomet’s menu also carry more sophisticated and challenging flavours than the American fast-food diet. Instead of generically cute animals/kids/princesses, here the main characters are bizarre and extreme, their facial design pushing way further into modernist shapes than Disney’s designers dared, and in terms of narrative Chomet usually takes an unconventional approach, following a path which might be interesting and unusual rather than worrying too much about conventional structure.
The rich background paintings of decaying old town Paris, reminiscent of a ramshackle version of the London from Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, were created by comic artist Nicolas de Crécy, a fellow student of Chomet’s at the School of Comics and Fine Arts at Angouleme and a collaborator in some early published comics. Crécy would also go on to design backgrounds for the fabulous looking Laika stop motion feature The Boxtrolls in 2014.
The music was provided by Jean Corti, formerly accordion player and composer for Jacques Brel. The musical theme in the film was originally written for Brel but the singer’s death in 1977 left it available for Corti to add it to the stew here.
Music aside, The Old Lady and the Pigeons is virtually a silent film, like the work of one of Chomet’s heroes Jaques Tati, who the central character here reminds me of somewhat. Although the film is French the only dialogue in fact is in English, the inane commentary of the American tourists around Paris which bookends the story, another suggestion of Chomet’s (and perhaps France’s) love/hate relationship with American culture.
This unsentimental – but, in its own way, affectionate – view of humanity can be seen as something of an hors d’oeuvre for Chomet’s masterly debut feature Belleville Rendevous (aka. The Triplets of Belleville, 2003) with its tiny but fearsome old ladies, angular headed characters, fat dogs and meandering, genre defying storyline. Chomet’s followup The Illusionist (2010) offers a beautifully bittersweet dessert and crowning glory to this trilogy of 2D animation haute cuisine.
Note: The 100 greatest animated shorts is an list of opinions and not an order of value from best to worst. Click here to see all of the picks of the list so far. All suggestions, comments and outrage are welcome but please don’t shoot us, it’s only a list!