Book review: French Animation History

Critics and film historians are unanimous: the history of French animation is distinctly divided into an ‘avant-Kirikou’ and an ‘après-Kirikou’. Before the 1998 release of Michel Ocelot’s Kirikou et la sorcière (Kirikou and the Sorceress), the output of the French animated film industry was limited to exceptional events – about one noteworthy film per decade (in a good decade). Scheduled for an inauspicious holiday release that pitted it against Disney’s Mulan and Dreamworks Studios’ The Prince of Egypt, Kirikou was initially visible on only roughly 60 art house screens in all of France, while Mulan had 660 screens and The Prince of Egypt, 690 (Anon, 1998). ¹ Although Kirikou did nowhere near the numbers of the Hollywood multiplex fodder (after five days, approximately 800,000 entries for Mulan and 650,000 for The Prince of Egypt), Kirikou’s 50,000 first-week entry eventually topped at over 1.5 million, plus some 700,000 DVDs sold (Vulser, 2004).

While members of the French press were eager to recount a David and Goliath story, Kirikou’s box office history is better summed up by the village children’s song in praise of the very tiny, very naked, very articulate newborn who, after he ‘s’enfante lui-même’ or ‘births himself’, gets immediately to business liberating his village from the machinations of the witch Karaba: ‘Kirikou est petit, mais il est vaillant. Kirikou n’est pas grand, mais il peut beaucoup’/‘Kirkou is small, but he is courageous. Kirkou isn’t big, but he can do much.’ Indeed, Kirikou’s unexpected financial success opened the door for many other projects (Sylvain Chomet’s Triplettes de Belleville [Triplets of Belleville, 2003] was given the green light by producer Didier Brunner as a direct result of that success), and French production increased dramatically: only two (resolutely unsuccessful) films were made in the 1990s before Kirikou, and in the years since, there have been as many as seven French animated films released per year. Put another way, French animated production quadrupled from 1996 to 2004 (Vulser, 2004). Thus, by the first decade of the 21st century, French animation had clearly entered a golden age.

Over a decade into this golden age, Richard Neupert’s French Animation History makes an extremely welcome appearance. While general and specialized press have given significant coverage to the explosion in French animated production, scholarship both on the French film industry and on the history of animated filmmaking has yet to catch up. Neupert’s book is a crucial first step in recognizing the quantity and quality of current French production, while simultaneously proposing a comprehensive history that accounts for the particular configuration of said contemporary production. Without making the (untenable) argument that contemporary French animated films deploy a unified aesthetic, Neupert asserts that the embrace of artisanal strategies, and the artistic deployment of visually nostalgic techniques, are not simply the result of smaller available budgets (compared to Hollywood standards). Instead, these filmmaking choices have emerged as a natural continuation of the position of animation within (or rather, on the margins of) the French film industry throughout the 20th century.

French Animation History is organized into six chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. The introduction in particular is quite substantive, highlighting the prominence of French figures in the proliferation of proto-cinematic devices pre-1895 and the experimentation done in France during cinema’s earliest years. The book’s introduction, ‘The Rise of Animation in France’, and second chapter, ‘Silent Animation: Emile Cohl and his Artisan Legacy’, have the particular merit of telling the beginnings of French animation as a dialogue with the recent wave of scholarly fascination with early cinema, connecting the dots between Neupert’s own narrative and the accounts given by scholars such as Tom Gunning, André Gaudreault, Laurent Mannoni and Don Crafton (only the latter of whom publishes extensively on animation per se). ² Indeed, one of the strengths of the book as a whole is the synthesis of a vast bibliography of secondary sources – the story of animated filmmaking in France has in fact been abundantly told, but only on the margins of other stories (about global animation history, French national cinema, early cinema, etc.). Neupert is to be congratulated on pulling these threads together into cogent synthesis. In addition to bringing out scholarly connections, he helpfully indicates where characteristics of proto-cinematic, early cinema devices and projection/audience configurations prefigure later techniques such as rotoscoping and digital practices.

Chapters three and four (‘French Animation and the Coming of Sound’ and ‘Toward an Alternative Studio Structure’, respectively) are dedicated to periods whose industry Neupert repeatedly (and fairly) characterizes with adjectives such as feeble, fragile, weak, personal, familial, artisanal, individualized and auteurist. The vast majority of the sections of these chapters are built around singular figures (to whit, Ladislas Starewich, Bertold Bartosch, Jean Painlevé, Alexandre Alexieff, Claire Parker, Paul Grimault, Jean-François Laguionie, and René Laloux). Since the career of each filmmaker is followed, the book does some temporal zig-zagging, all the while maintaining an overarching chronological progression throughout the century. In these chapters it is clear that the ‘Frenchness’ of French Animation History means films ‘made in France’, as the overwhelming majority of these figures were expatriates, immigrants and exiles (for some of whom France was only a way station en route to further migration). Throughout the book, Neupert acknowledges the international origins of his filmmakers as well as the transnational character of various films (international co-productions, for example), but for some readers, the need to emphasize the filmmakers and films treated in the book as ‘French’ will seem occasionally forced. French Animation History is deeply implicated in what some might assert is a mythology of French national cinema as an art cinema. In this narrative, animation logically becomes the nec plus ultra of the industry – the most marginalized of the marginalized, the most oppositional of the oppositional. Yet, however contentious national cinemas in general might be, or the ‘artistic’ identity of French national cinema specifically, Neupert’s presentation of French animation is very much in alignment with French film’s long-term maintenance (of its own cultural capital – as crossroads of the artistic avant-garde during the interwar period, as self-appointed arbiter of taste through the prominence of the Cannes and most importantly for animation) Annecy film festivals, etc.

‘French Animation’s Renaissance’, the book’s fifth and final full chapter, is dedicated to Michel Ocelot and other recent filmmakers. This chapter contains (along with the chapter on Emile Cohl), the most extensive discussions of individual films, as is logical, given the ease of availability of these films. (It is worth noting that Neupert has obligingly indicated availability of DVD rarities, such as CNC, Lobster Film and Les docs releases, as relevant throughout the text.) Potential readers should be forewarned that French Animation History is not the place to come looking for extended analysis or close reading: most discussion of films is necessarily descriptive and will therefore read most engagingly for those not already familiar with the works in question. Given the richness of early 21st- century production, this chapter perhaps unavoidably leaves one wanting more, as only a limited number of worthy films can be treated. Indeed, I found myself frequently wanting more throughout the course of the book. Neupert makes an absolutely valid and well-justified choice to limit his discussion to film rather than television. Nonetheless his brief discussions of commercial (advertising) filmmaking in chapter two (pp. 45–54) and television or ‘transitional animation’ in chapter four (pp. 107–114), along with allusions to the historical importance of advertising and television as career paths for French animators, are tantalizing. In chapter five, I would have liked to read more about how efforts to take on Hollywood genre cinema on its own terms, such as Luc Besson’s Arthur series, might signal the end of the ‘national art cinema’ model in which Neupert casts the history of French animation – or how these efforts are (perversely?) recuperated in national and international discourse that ascribes to such models. This ‘more’, however, is reasonably left to be work for another day and would probably have required French Animation History to be a different project from the outset.

This book is strongly recommended for library acquisition, and should also be considered for course adoption now that paperback and e-book editions are available. The sheer quantity of critical and box-office successes that continue to roll out of France almost certainly means that French animated films will begin to appear more prominently in the corpuses of scholarly works dedicated to contemporary French national cinema and to contemporary animation. However, Neupert’s book is likely to have a long shelf life as a singular history at the intersection of the fields of national cinema and animated film scholarship. Appropriately, the book has abundant illustrations (47 small color plates at the end and 41 black and white images throughout the body of text). One inevitably regrets editorial constraints, because the quality here is frustrating – the size of the images does not allow the reader to appreciate the visual qualities that Neupert enumerates within the text. This lack of detail tends to sell the films short and indeed undercuts the sense of the films’ visual ‘flavor’ that Neupert’s ekphrasis begins to establish.

Through the course of French Animation History, Richard Neupert elegantly pirouettes between industrial history and the auteurism that he maintains is the hallmark of that industry. In this work, he has felicitously established a framework that should prove to be most useful for the further scholarly examination of animation in France.