Gavin McDowell here. Last time, I looked at French films that spawned famous English-language remakes. That one was a bit indulgent, as the films had a batting average just above mediocrity. Today, we are going to look at French animation of the past decade or so, and with that comes a precipitous drop in quality. The format today is also going to be more typical from here on out. The films I will cover all came out while I was already living in France. I remember their releases and was taking the Zeitgeist’s pulse, so I can contextualize them historically. All without having to do any research! Let’s begin.
Titeuf (Titeuf: Le Film, Zep, 2011)
Titeuf: The Film follows Titeuf: The Series which was adapted from Titeuf: The Comic, all of which are the brainchild of one Zep (oh, excuse me, I must adhere to Alternate Ending editorial standards: the mononymous Zep). Even though Zep is a watch-wearing chocolate hoarder and not a real Frenchman (they are neutral; I am not), Titeuf has soundly conquered the world of the French bande dessinée (BD, or upscale comic book), elbowing his way past Astérix the Gaul, Lucky Luke, and that beer-guzzling waffle-snarfer Tintin. If you haven’t heard of him, it’s not for lack of trying. He was Englished in the UK as Tootuff, and the TV show (apparently under the original title) tried to penetrate the Anglophone world with little success.
In the 2010s, a surprising number of BD properties received film adaptations, most of them, following a trail blazed by Astérix, in live-action (watch this space!). A few select BD IPs became animated films directed by the original creators. Some of these, like The Rabbi’s Cat (Joann Sfar and Sandrina Jardel, 2011) or Aya of Yop City (Marguerite Abouet and Clément Oubrerie, 2014) are truly excellent and so exempt from coverage in this series. And then there’s Titeuf! So what’s it about? Mostly it’s about a ten-year-old boy, Treetop, trying to navigate the stormy winds of puberty. He is still at the age when farts are funny and girls are gross, but he is also drawn to his classmate, the duckfaced Nadia, a girl who resembles his mother.
In terms of personality, Tito falls somewhere between the licensed but extracanonical Bart Simpson merchandise (e.g., Bartman) and the assuredly unlicensed Calvin bumper stickers sported by people with an outsize animus against Chevrolet. He is extremely crude, ill-mannered, and not a little bit endearing. The actual plot is not TiVo’s antics to get Nadia to bend to his will (specifically, to invite him to her birthday party), but his attempts to make sense of his parents’ sudden separation. This sends the film to some dark places.
In the first tableau, we have an incident where Te’o’s Dad meets an old flame and invites her over for a booty call. A subplot where Dad intends to cheat on his still-wife in a movie allegedly for children is only the entrée; the main course is when Teebo asks the woman if she has daughters (he is deathly afraid of girls, including becoming one or being related to one), and then, when she says no, tells her she’s too old to have kids anyway. Cock successfully blocked, Dad and Bebop share a tender moment to French rock legend Jean-Jacques Goldman’s song “What Use are Girls?”
Did you think that was misogynistic? We’re just getting warmed up! Later, Bitcoin and friends pay an older girl to show them her tits. Which—the director taking advantage of the “it’s legal if it’s animated” loophole—she does. And you, the viewer, get to see them too! And then, when Brebeuf realizes Nadia’s father is out of the picture, he tries to hook up their parents so that they can live in the same house and she can never, ever, ever get away from him.
I have dwelt on the weird sex stuff and not enough on the scatological humor, which is an important leitmotif. The opening prehistoric dream sequence has the most fart-and-shit jokes per minute, but in the grander scheme, we have Taggart: spitting in Nadia’s face; vomiting on the school principal; pissing on his Dad’s carpet; winning a belching contest; and being shat upon by a bovine. I may have missed some, but you don’t have to take my word for it!
Cinderella: Once Upon a Time in the West (Cendrillon au Far West, Pascal Hérold, 2012)
While Beefsteak was made with the finest Flash or Flash-adjacent technology, other French studios decided to chase the CGI train and make something in the style of the big American studios. Usually, this would mean looking to Disney, Pixar, or DreamWorks for inspiration, but one day in early 2012 someone at Delacave Studios cracked open a newspaper and thought, “What won the animation Oscar this year? What’s this? Rango?” And so we got yet another permutation of the Cinderella story, this time in the not-quite-final frontier of the Far West.
A picture is worth a thousand words, they say, and since I am already running a bit long, I am going to cut right to the chase:
What you saw right before your face melted is Felicity, the evil stepmother, and the two ugly stepsisters. You may have noticed they are theriomorphic, which is a Greek word meaning “marketed to Furries.” In the mold of Disney’s Robin Hood, we have here a traditional folktale retold by animals, except in this rendition none of the animals are native to the setting. This includes Cinderella herself, a gazelle with human-shaped thighs, crotch, and buttocks. The Prince resembles a King Charles, and the pirate captain Ignatius Lopez Santamaria Barbazul is played by a gorilla.
What’s that, you say? There are no pirates in Cinderella? I’ve never read Perrault’s version, so who’s to say, but this version has a collection of simian bandidos (literally, you understand; Google tells me this can also be an ethnic slur, which is not far off either) who are dressed simultaneously like The Three Amigos and The Pirates of the Caribbean. They are not the only ethnic and/or racial stereotypes to be found in the film. The narrator, for example, wears a headdress and calls himself a shaman. Guess which role in the Cinderella story he’s going to play! One of Felicity’s callers is a reverse satyr bearing a “Very ancient! Veeery expensive!” vase from the Ming Dynasty. The Prince’s mother, the Duchess (they are touring the New World, or, in my headcanon, fleeing the Revolution) is a White Russian with a thick v’s for b’s accent (and also a bird; yes, her son is a dog). She is abducted by Barbazul after a bar brawl (during which Cinderella loses a tooth, and the besotted Prince vows to find its owner), and their dialogue—wherein one party speaks French with a cartoon Russian accent and the other with a cartoon Mexican accent—is almost the worst thing in the world.
The worst thing, of course is the character design, but the animation is close behind. It’s one of those things for which the phrase “Looks like a PlayStation cutscene” was coined. The music and sound are doing double-duty to undercut the poorly animated action, since the sound effects (like gunshots) are muted and the soundtrack resembles the background music at a Tex-Mex restaurant. Still, not every film can reach this level of terrible this concisely (77 minutes!). There are probably worse uses of your time. Such as…
Animal Kingdom: Let’s Go Ape (Pourquoi j’ai pas mangé mon père, Jamel Debbouze, 2015)
As with Cinderella, my attraction to Animal Kingdom was the character design, which is surely the Abomination of Desolation Christ warned of in the Scriptures. The animation was done via motion capture, a technology made famous by Andy Serkis in Lord of the Rings, and Andy Serkis in King Kong, and Andy Serkis in Planet of the Apes. What does mo-cap look like when it’s not performed by Serkis animals? It looks like this:
Two things about this film are more interesting than the film itself. The first is the title. The film—whatever you want to call it—is based on a novel by Roy Lewis, which is known either as What We Did to Father, or Once Upon an Ice Age, or perhaps Evolution Man, before finally becoming The Evolution Man, or How I Ate My Father. The French name, translated as Why I Didn’t Eat My Father, is the reverse of one or more of the English titles, perhaps as a sly indication that it will not be a very faithful adaptation. The international distributors who retitled the film miraculously stumbled upon one that is worse than any of these.
The second point of interest is that the film desecrates the memory of one of France’s national treasures, comic Louis de Funès (if you, English reader, have seen him in anything, it was probably 1973’s The Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob). Archival footage and voice recordings tempted director Jamel Debbouze and Funès’ own family to tamper in God’s domain, giving us the useless character of Vladimir. Backlash against this started even before the film’s release, and it was completely suppressed in the (otherwise aggressive) advertising campaign. Vladimir promptly vanishes halfway through the film, leaving us to wonder if he was the casualty of outrage or a dearth of usable material.
As I indicated, Animal Kingdom is a poor adaptation of its source material, but it is a good adaptation of several other properties, including: The Lion King (shamelessly), Planet of the Apes, Avatar, Quest for Fire, and—I am very, very sorry to report—The Blue Lagoon. The story involves a tribe of ape-like creatures whose leader begets a pair of twins, the brutish Vania and Edouard, the first human. Their religious leader, simply called The Witch—think “evil Rafiki”—smells a bad omen and orders that Edouard be exposed. He is saved, of course—though not before permanently damaging his right arm. I cannot think of why this plot development was necessary, unless it was part of the original (Vania is a relic here; he is the narrator’s uncle in the novel, making him…). What this means is that Edouard’s right arm is permanently shoved down his loincloth for the whole movie, as illustrated in the above still. Eventually, he takes out his hand long enough to get with Lucy (also pictured above), who is played by Wonder Woman’s nemesis Cheetah. Together they form the first human society.
On the whole, this is a better movie than either Tartuffe or Cinderella, but it is a deep, deep dive into the Uncanny Valley, which here becomes a ravine or maybe even a canyon (the Uncanyon?). The plot is weirdly recursive; Edouard’s inventiveness continually gets him expelled from his tribe, yet he keeps coming back. And it’s surprisingly dark. I mentioned eugenics, but there is also a lengthy discussion between the two brothers about what they should do with their deceased father (that title isn’t a metaphor). The English version is accordingly censored, although I don’t know what they took out. I would have opted for Edouard’s irritating rapid-fire vocals, or perhaps the one original song, “Get up et fais ton truc” (Lève-toi and do your thing).
Gavin McDowell is a Hoosier by birth and French by adoption. He received his doctorate in “Languages, History, and Literature of the Ancient World from the Beginning until Late Antiquity” and is currently investigating Aramaic translations of the Bible. He is supremely unqualified to talk about film. For more of his unprovoked movie opinions, see his Letterboxd account.
Bad French Cinema Index
Part 1: French Films with Famous Remakes
Part 2: French Animation
Part 3: Serial (Bad) Weddings
Part 4: Live-Action Fairy Tales
Part 5: The Tuche Family
Part 6: Asterix and Obelix