A Magnificent Life (Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol, 2025) ‘Cinemania’ Movie Review: Textured Animation Lends Depth to a Hastily Sketched Portrait of a French Icon

With “The Triplets of Belleville,” Sylvain Chomet paid tribute to the collective cultural footprints of New York, Paris and Montreal; with “The Illusionist,” Chomet paid tribute to the soft comedic quietude of Jacques Tati; with the opening scene of “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Chomet paid tribute to the notion that even an unmitigated dumpster-fire can have a single watchable scene as long as its guest-directed by somebody else entirely. Now comes “A Magnificent Life,” which finds the animator paying tribute to the work of an undisputed titan of French cinema.

The “of French cinema” part is essential here, as Marcel Pagnol’s is a name unlikely to turn the heads of burgeoning global cinephiles to the same reverential—if often distant—degree as Lumière or Cocteau. Chomet, however, is entirely aware of this reality, which is why “A Magnificent Life” is just as much about enshrining Pagnol’s legacy as it is about affirming its uniquely local appeal, encased in the thick parlance of a rural Marseillaise accent.

This legacy begins, as so many do, at the end, with an elderly Marcel Pagnol (Laurent Lafitte) reckoning with his waning relevance as a playwright who can’t even sell out a theater the size of a broom closet. Approached with the prospect of an artist’s profile for a young publication called Elle Magazine, Pagnol struggles to even remember the eventful life that had led him to this more modest twilight period.

A still from A Magnificent Life (Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol, 2025)

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Pagnol’s memory needs coaxing, and as it turns out, all he needs to do so is a mysterious and jovial young child who appears, semi-translucent, across the course of his own life and the lives of those around him in those recollected moments. This is Marcel in his pre-teen years, and this ghostly figure will push the aged Pagnol into recalling a life filled with artistic strife and rewarding payoff, from the stage to the silver screen, and back again.

Originally conceived as a documentary on the life of the legendary artist, Chomet’s animated segments proved rich enough to inspire a complete change in direction, shifting “A Magnificent Life” into a biopic recounted in unorthodox style. In truth, this isn’t the first animated biopic, but Chomet’s particular vision of hand-drawn visuals lends an unhurried sense of pacing befitting a film that splits its time between provincial France and a Paris clouded by the memory of when the City of Lights was but a distant dream.

And in part, that’s the problem; Chomet’s now-signature visual stamp—whose fusion of soft hues and harsh figure lines splits the difference somewhere between “Popeye” and Ralph Bakshi—undoubtedly lends to this air of local decompression, but so too does that very sentiment appear somewhat antithetical to the sprawl of such a figure’s detailed history. In “A Magnificent Life,” a figure made mythical in France and largely unsung in the rest of the filmgoing world is shown to be instrumental in the French transition to talkies, a distinct combatant against Nazi-occupied propaganda, and a key figure in the postwar trans-Atlantic collaboration that would define America’s place within the French cinema sphere. And this is all just in the second half of a 90-minute feature!

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Chomet puts in his best effort to add further shaping to Pagnol’s strained relationship with his father, as well as that which develops between the artist and his longtime collaborator Raimu (a wonderfully curt Thierry Garcia). Those dynamics shared with his siblings, the revolving door of lovers, and the head of Nazi-controlled Continental Films, Alfred Greven? Not so much.

That “A Magnificent Life” constitutes Chomet’s first attempt at dialogue-driven animation does come to be apparent in his struggle to find the rhythm in his words to bridge the gaps in that memory, as Pagnol finds himself sifting through its highlights to lay out his legacy in his own terms, and we find ourselves sifting through those highlights to try and understand what makes them highlights at all.

The film never loses track of the regional distinction that made Pagnol and his work so deeply felt to those that admired his once-niche offerings—the Marseille accent as both a point of pride and comedy that he anxiously incorporated into his work, knowing full well that the greater urban French public would likely find no value in it, plays a large part in this artist’s depicted journey. Nobody, then, can deny that Sylvain Chomet has, in painting Pagnol’s life in broad strokes, taken the pains to foreground the potential inaccessibility of his subject and, in a sense, illustrate his more insulated appeal. After an amusing 90 minutes, though, one wonders whether it was the point for outsiders to leave the film just as hazy to Pagnol’s accomplishments as when they entered—and, more to the point, whether that continued ignorance was even intended.