Watching “The Illusionist’’ is like peering through a rippled windowpane onto a past that knows it’s disappearing. A seriocomic evocation of vanished pleasures — postwar Europe, British music-hall performers, the films of legendary French comic Jacques Tati — this glowing animated feature reserves its greatest and quietest melancholy for the gulf that can grow between a father and daughter as the latter moves forward and the former stays put.
The two main characters are, strictly speaking, not related. The Illusionist (voiced in agreeable murmurs by Jean-Claude Donda) is merely a shabby traveling magician sloping toward his last engagement, and Alice (Eilidh Rankin) is the orphaned backstage teenager to whom he shows a little kindness and who joins him on the road. The relationship is classically Chaplinesque but also familiar to anyone who has tended to a child’s growing and then outgrowing one’s care. That “The Illusionist’’ plays out in near-silence against a pointillistic backdrop of European cities and Scottish landscapes — lovingly hand-drawn with the occasional bloom of computer-animated light and horizon — only makes the loss more beautiful and more inevitable.
