Triplets of Belleville’s director just invented a new genre, the cozy ghost-story biopic

Sylvain Chomet’s animated biography of legendary French writer Marcel Pagnol comes with a strange supernatural twist A Magnificent Life feels like a personal story for Sylvain Chomet, even though it’s about a completely different filmmaker. The first animated feature from the Triplets of Belleville writer-director since 2010’s The Illusionist, A Magnificent Life skims across the life story of revered French playwright, filmmaker, and novelist Marcel Pagnol. The film covers the highlights of his childhood and professional career, while zooming in on how growing up in Marseille (a small backwater by Parisian standards, especially in the early 1900s), worked its way into his art, his voice, and his philosophy. Pagnol had a remarkable, storied life: He’s perhaps best known in the U.S. as the writer of the tremendous classics Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources (adapted and expanded from his own 1952 film, then later adapted into a pair of Claude Berri movies) In France, though, he's better known for the Marseille Trilogy. Still, a straightforward greatest-hits run through his career would be a dry approach, and there would be no reason to make it an animated feature. Chomet makes th