Impertinent, incisive, insolent: as much adjectives as one might very well associate with the animated film Linda wants chicken. Linda, a character kid, wants to eat her favorite dish after her mother Paulette unjustly punished her. Only flat is the general strike and finding chicken is impossible... or almost impossible!
Interview with Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach
Presented in May ACID at the Cannes Film Festival, Linda wants chicken had already managed to seduce the cruise. Ovated by a pubic won by the hilarity during his presentation, this thug French-Italian comedy repeats in Annecy. Directed and staged in concert by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, this virevolt feature film has won the Cristal d'argent and the Prix Fondation Gan à la Diffusion, giving Dolce vita films, a committed producer, and the artistic teams we met. Release scheduled for October 18, 2023.
An acidic comedy
With a colorful graphic style, coupled with contours marked with greasy chalk, the expressions of the characters are powerful. Each of them has its own elementary color and animation gives free expression to imagination with penciled and united backs. At the beginning of the game, Linda and her mother came to life thanks to a particularly vivid palette of emotions.
Beyond the visual prowess and a graphic bias that echoes The Young Girl Without Hands Sébastien Laudenbach's sound mix is remarkable. Rather than having chosen a traditional dubbing, the actors who lent their voice to the protagonists operated in real shooting, like a traditional film production. And it is felt in the spontaneity of the replicas that blow in gusts.
Frankly funny thanks to the muscular writing of the characters, each one having a well tempered character, one laughs throat spread throughout a rock adventure that limits more and more to the absurd. The story accelerates in the last third to a successful symbolic epilogue.
Chicken: gun by destination?
Behind this beating rhythmic comedy drum, the film also takes care to tap a power that increasingly prefers order to freedom. The children, by default anarchists, offer a beautiful unexpected resistance to a disproportionate police device. A whole battalion was mobilized to recover this damn poultry that Paulette had been covering. The young mother wanted to be pardoned by her daughter, while the general strike condemned supermarkets to stay closed. It's the arm that opposes love to injustice, legitimacy to legality.
This also goes through small details of the city's framework to Serge, this nice cop often disobeyed and who obeys the orders of his superior even if he cumulates the bumblebees. The unfortunate wanted to be a magician and ended up with a truncheon in his hand rather than a baguette (still a sad victim of Parcourup).
However, Linda from Chicken is in no way wanted as a pamphlet and the film should please both young and old but perhaps not for the same reasons. Each character is endearing, won by a share of light that ultimately only needs to spring out. This feature film deals among other things with the question of single parenthood through Paulette's touching character like that of Astrid: two women diametrically opposed despite the ties of blood and yet both alone. Through these portraits, Linda wants chicken sketch his problems with malice.
By enrolling in a city where living together is the lance of everyday life, the sudden eruption of a tide of CRS in robocops is singed to better end up hoaxing. A smoke reminds us of tear gas, watermelons from the LBD and still that damn chicken that remains elusive. Like an echo of the real that became sadly banal in 2023.
A sweet song my mother sang to me
Finally, by choosing to integrate original rhymes composed by Clement Ducol, the directors give another metaphorical dimension to the film. Whether it's Astrid, Linda's aunt, an authoritarian Yoga teacher, who gets rid of candy to calm his nerves, Paulette, who is finally as stubborn as her own daughter, or even Serge who so dreamed of becoming a magician, these musical interludes recall the part of childhood that resides even in the most resigned adults.
Visually, it is also the moment of poetic escapes during sequences with uncomplexed animation, between fantasies and dreams to fulfill. The deeper it sinks into the imagination of the characters, the cleaner the background in terms of composition as well as colors.
Chicken run
In Annecy's alleys, those who had been able to see the film had already flaired the sacre expected for the closing ceremony. A presage that has not been lacking. Linda wants chicken is an impertinent comedy, a crazy race that knows how to grasp the stakes of an era to treat them with the remedy of laughter. Rather than retreating to a dreary daily, it is an invitation to solidarity, a dream of freedom and an outpouring of painting in the grey of reality.
Thanks for this review that makes you want to run into a dark room to meet Linda and Paulette!
We are already conquered, driven by an inextinguishable hunger for chicken!
[...] Anime is a French-Japanese coproduction between Miyu Production (blind Willows, sleeping woman, Linda wants Chicken, etc.) and the Shin-Ei studio. Animation. Karin, 11, is abandoned by her father at her home.