He is the greatest French animation director of his generation. Before him, until the early Nineties, there was Michel Ocelot, but he wasn’t known in Italy. Chomet’s works are also very communicative both for children and for adults. Sylvain was born in Maison-Lafitte, Yvesline, near Paris. He studied at the Plastic Arts High School and graduated in 1982, two years later he signed up for the Duperré School of Applied Arts on fashion designing and also the visual expression section. He didn’t finish this last course and went to Angouleme in the South-West of France, where he graduated in 1987 at the High School of Image. One year before he published his first comic strip “Secrets of the Dragonfly”, moreover he made the adaptation of the Victor Hugo “Bug-Jargal” novel in collaboration with Nicolas de Crécy. In 1988 he moved to England and started working for the Richard Purdom Studio. In September of the same year he worked as a freelance for Principality, Renault, Swissair e Swinton commercials. He came back to France in 1990 and realised the musical video Ça va, Ça va for the TSF group. In 1991 Chomet started to plan his first animation movie, The Old Lady and the Pigeons short film, in collaboration with Nicolas de Crécy for the scenography. In 1992 he wrote the screenplay for the science fiction comic strip drawn by Hubert Chevillaud. The next year he moved to Canada and wrote the screenplay for the Leon-la-Came comic strip drawn again by de Crécy. The work was published in 1995 and received the René Goscinny Award in 1996. The same year he completed the realisation of The Old Lady and the Pigeons short film, a 24-minute movie, which won the BAFTA Award, the Grand Prix for Best Short Film at the Annecy Festival and the Cartoon d'Or Award. The most important thing is that it received the nomination for the Oscars. This is the plot: a policeman, thin and malnourished, surrounded everyday by well-being people, sees an old lady who rushes to prepare and give delicious lunches to the pigeons of the neighbourhood. They are so fat they cannot even fly. So the policeman dressed up as a huge pigeon and cheated the old lady for a while, he feels so guilty that he has nightmares, but he cannot stop. He becomes so fat that when the old lady tries to send him away he can’t take off his costume and falls from the window. At the end he is thin again and without his pigeon costume, but still convinced to be a pigeon, picking up the crumbs that the tourists throw in front of the Eiffel Tower.
In 2003 his first full-length animation film was published, a little masterpiece named The Triplets of Belleville, which won many awards and nominations for both César Award (where it won for the Best Soundtrack) and the Oscars. Around 2005 he founded the DjangoFilms animation studio in Edinburgh, Scotland, and started a project for Barbacoa, but it hadn’t enough financing and everything stopped. In 2006 his short Eiffel Tower will be a part of the episodic movie Paris Je t'aime. A boy tells how his parents, mime artists, known each other in prison. Then Chomet was planned to direct a British-American project, The Tale of Despereaux, but because of misunderstandings and bad feelings in the end the film is directed by Sam Fell and Robert Stevenhagen, and came out in theatres in 2008. The next year, in Edinburg, he realised The Illusionist, adapted from an unpublished story by Jacques Tati. It was released in 2010 and the critics acclaimed it, less did the public, but it’s a film that will long remain a cult. It won the European Film Award and a Cesar for Best Animated Feature Film, as well as an Oscar nomination. In 2013 he realised the first film with real actors, Attila Marcel which was presented at the Toronto International Film Festival. He made a cameo appearance as an actor in the Italian film directed by Matthew Oleotto Zoran, il mio nipote scemo (Zoran, My Nephew the Idiot) (2013), as a guru of darts. In 2014 he directed the gag of the sofa at the beginning of an episode of The Simpsons, Diggs, and a musical inspired to The Triplets of Belleville. Currently he is planning a live-action movie and animation, The Thousand Miles, inspired by Federico Fellini’s drawings with the Thousand Miles as theme.
