Le Tableau, film de Jean-François Laguionie

"Le Tableau" ("The Painting")

With six film festival nominations, animated film Le Tableau(“The Painting") has already met with both critical and popular success. Due to the wonderful script by Anik Le Ray and its magic realization by director Jean-François Laguionie, it develops a wonderfully fanciful conceit on the notion of what a painting is, means and represents.

The story:  a painting has been left incomplete, and the figures peopling it form a society consisting of three castes: the Toupins (“tout-peint”, or “all-painted”), the Pafinis (“pas-fini”, or “not-finished”) and the Reufs (from the English word “roughs”). The increasing violence of the Toupins in rejecting both the Pafinis and especially the Reufs leads to three characters leaving the painting itself in a search for The Painter to ask him to finish his work, to thereby bring peace to their troubled world.
There is the mystery too of The Painter, whose own story we gradually come to understand in his absence as the three explorers discover his studio and his other paintings. There is the development as well of the idea of forging one’s self and growing as an individual. All this enriches the wonderful aesthetics of the film’s graphic elements.

For the film’s greater story is about creativity. When the adventurers set out, they are three seeking to meet their Creator. Only one, Lola, will take the risk of true self-discovery to actually have an encounter with The Painter (played by director Laguionia himself) in the world of unpainted reality. The plot’s conceit there reaches its greatest moment, caught in an offhand remark she tosses over her shoulder as she embarks on her exploration of this different, limitless world: “I wonder who painted you.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5NNf1lrj2c