EIFF reviews: The Illusionist | Boy

• The Illusionist's protagonists lost on Princes Street.

THE Edinburgh International Film Festival couldn't have found a more visually beautiful celebration of its host city than the opening night gala premiere of Sylvain Chomet's The Illusionist (***).

The director of the relentlessly inventive animated charmer Belleville Rendez-Vous has used his wonderfully wonky, defiantly 2D, hand-drawn animation style to present a lovingly detailed vision of the city circa 1959.

Whether it's drifting down a gorgeously rendered Broughton Street and stopping off in the Barony Bar, languishing over the shop displays of Jenners like a Scottish take on Breakfast at Tiffany's, or popping into the Cameo cinema to catch a screening of Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle, the film plays like a love- letter to the capital from a director clearly head-over-heels.

Yet while his film is romantic and nostalgic, Chomet avoids perpetrating tartan tweeness by underscoring it with an air of melancholy arising from the story about the rapidly disappearing world of vaudeville. That's something to which his old-fashioned animation style and unwavering belief in visual rather than dialogue-led storytelling is ideally suited (especially in the age of wisecracking 3D digital animation) so it's a shame that its themes, valid as they are, aren't tethered to a more engaging narrative.

Adapted from an unproduced screenplay written by Tati in the 1960s, this tale about a Parisian magician facing his own obsolescence as he's forced to travel further afield in search of work proves a little too thin, especially once his travels take him to the Western Isles, where a young Highland girl, entranced by his magic tricks, follows him to Edinburgh in the hope of finding a fulfilling future.

Once in the capital their story simply meanders and drifts. They grow apart while all the fringe artists among whom they naturally take refuge find themselves being casually discarded by an indifferent, ever-changing world.

The film clearly wants us to feel something akin to profound sadness about all of this, but The Illusionist is, ironically, too reliant on visual sleight of hand. Once you strip away the overwhelming wow factor of the film's design, the absence of strong characterisation ensures the end result is bleaker and less affecting than was probably intended.

Boy (****) on the other hand, goes straight for the heart. This sweet coming-of-age film is the latest from New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi, a sometime collaborator of Flight of the Conchords who made his feature debut with the egregiously quirky Eagle vs Shark a couple of years back. That film had its moments, but often felt too beholden to its leftfield influences (Michel Gondry, Wes Anderson) in a way that Boy effortlessly transcends, courtesy of a more personal feel, a greater sense of place and some lovely performances from the mostly young and inexperienced cast.

Set in 1984 in Waititi's hometown of Raukokore, a small Maori settlement on the Eastern Cape of New Zealand's North Island, it's the story of the titular Boy (James Rolleston), a Michael Jackson-obsessed ten-year-old with a vivid imagination and a lot of potential – even if he doesn't quite know what that word means.

Looked after by his grandmother, he lives with little brother Rocky, cousins and a pet goat in a shabby house in the middle of nowhere. Despite being picked on by bigger kids (and unable to command the attention of the girl on whom he has a crush), he seems to have a relatively carefree existence hanging out with his friends. Things start to change, however, when the absent jail-bound father he's never met suddenly shows up.

With his mother long since deceased, Boy has mythologised his dad, Alamein (Waititi), out of all proportion, so his unexpected arrival – while his gran is out of town attending a funeral – inevitably seems magical to him, even if everyone else can see this ne'er-do-well's presence is setting Boy up for future heartbreak. That's the point, though.

As a writer/director Waititi negotiates the emotional minefield of Boy's adolescence with great skill, mixing broad comedy, scrappy animation and flights of fantasy that plug us into the headspace of this pint-sized protagonist as he tries to negotiate the confusions and complications of the world as he sees them. It's also good to be confronted with a film that doesn't feel the need to soften its cultural identity for the sake of some mythical universal audience. The accents sound unaffected and local turns of phrase – including some that can't be printed here – kick up the gags-to-giggle ratio in a big way.

There's not much to laugh about in Lucky (***), Spellbound director Jeffrey Blitz's slick and accessible documentary exploring the fates of several American lottery jackpot winners – and one eternal optimist whose lottery addiction amounts to an $80 a day habit – makes for fairly depressing viewing.

Winning tens of millions of dollars won't, it turns out, solve all your problems, but it might accentuate your worst character flaws, or at the very least, expose your garish tastes in home dcor.

The film makes subtle connections between the corruption that has plagued the lottery's history in the US and the corruption of the soul that seems to afflict the biggest winners, but unfortunately doesn't explore the most intriguing question thrown up: why all the winners think God has something to do with their fortune, good or bad.

• For screening details see edfilmfest.org

EIFF reviews: The Illusionist | Boy | Lucky