Every time someone takes a comic book character the world loves and decides to make an animated movie, there's a chance they won't do the original designs justice. "The Adventures of Tintin" immediately springs to mind, as Spielberg and company made the bold choice to swap artist Hergé's attractive, clean designs with horrifying performance-capturing zombies. Or 2019's disappointing reboot of "The Addams Family," which effectively turned Charles Addams' ghoulish sketches into benign, generic-looking balloon animals.
This is an issue that the folks at ON Entertainment take seriously. They were the ones who translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The Little Prince" to the screen, err on the side of overdoing the CG equivalent in this case. Now the same studio has done well with Petit Nicolas by Jean-Jacques Sempé and René Goscinny - or Petit Nicolas to English speakers, who are almost certainly less familiar with the source material (essentially France's response to Dennis the Menace) and probably not as picky when it comes to how the character is treated.
Directors: Amandine Fredon, Benjamin Massoubre
Writers: Michel Fessler, Anne Goscinny, René Goscinny
Stars: Alain Chabat, Laurent Lafitte, Simon Faliu
The thing is, you don't even have to know Sempé and Goscinny's work to recognize what a labor of love "Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be" is. Every frame from co-directors Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre, the award-winning nostalgic adaptation at Annecy, pays homage to their work – so much so that Petit Nicolas isn't even the film's main character. Sempé and Goscinny are.
Here's a film, co-written by Goscinny's daughter, Anne, about a friendship between two artists that spawned one of France's most popular phenomena: a carefree middle-class kid (voiced by Simon Faliu) who loves airplanes, hates girls, and makes a mess of just about any situation. Six years older than Sempé, Goscinny (Alain Chabat) is perhaps best known for co-creating Asterix. Both men moved to Paris aspiring to be illustrators. Sempé joined the army at 17, knowing it would take him to the capital. Goscinny first spent a few years in New York, where he worked alongside Mad magazine cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, but found greatest success in Paris as a writer.
If you want to know their story - how they met and where the ideas for Little Nicholas' little universe came from - then 'Little Nicholas' is for you. If you're expecting a straight-forward adaptation of one or more of his adventures, be prepared for a lot of unnecessary baggage and a foreign backstory. It helps that the Sempé and Goscinny sequences take place in a beautiful past version of Paris - a version that more closely resembles Ludwig Bemelmans' Madeline books than Sempé's own illustrations, although the intent was clearly to render the artists in the same style as their creation. .
The problem with the biographical accent is that it's virtually devoid of drama or particularly interesting details. Sempé's publisher wanted him to deliver a recurring weekly comic strip, and so he turned to his trusted friend Goscinny to write the stories. It's fun to watch them fumble around with alternate versions of Nicholas's parents, including a drawing of a middle-class family in which dad is a classics teacher and mom plays the harp, before landing on the solution that might be the as average as possible. But making Nicholas relatable seems to have been key. Cartoons were immediately popular, and the couple expanded the world around them.
Adding more characters makes the animated vignettes extrapolated from the books more interesting. The images of Sempé were so cute that the mere sight of little Nicolas walking through the puddles could be enough to make you laugh. But his best cartoons were more elaborate, featuring a group of rowdy characters in Nicholas' front yard, cutting each other off in class or misbehaving on the beach. As if taking a page from Looney Tunes' meta-classic "Duck Amuck" (the one where Daffy fights with the cartoonist's pencil), the film purports to sketch such places in real time, while a gentle effect of smeared watercolor brings the scene to life.
It's a charming technique that perfectly suggests what Little Nicholas fans have been doing all these years: when readers see a doodle of Sempé, they instantly imagine the character in action. Little Nicholas was an inherently dynamic character – closer to Bill Watterson's spastic Calvin than Charles M. Schulz's sedentary Charlie Brown, who languished in a limited number of poses – so there's something intuitive about the style. simple look flipbook.
Watch Little Nicholas 2022 Movie Trailer
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