17 January 2023. Awakening at the aurora to take the Thalys, direction Paris. The grey landscapes of the Sleeping Somme continue. Here I went to meet the filmmaker Michel Ocelot, after timidly addressing him during the winter holidays.
A dream awake
When I leave the train station, I take advantage of my advance to walk around the streets and refuse as long as possible to break into the city. The Parisians timidly started their days and walked on the sidewalks. The cars are on Lafayette Street. Sheltered in the entrance to a theatre, actresses warm their voices and enchant the surrounding area. Some bastards walk their dogs. Despite the gloves, the tip of my fingers shivers in front of the bite of the cold.
Arriving in front of the heavy door, my apprehension is at its peak. Fear of unknown. The names scroll on the bell. My questions are ready, I got my first answers, listened to several interviews he has already given, more or less recent. Finally displays in great capital letters « OCELOT ». Yet I have no idea what's going to happen when I walk past his apartment. No answer to my repeated bells. Attacked by the cold, I take refuge in a nearby church.
The tranquillity of the place moves and allows me to regain my feet. I am lost in the contemplation of stained glass windows and various chapels; I read everything that comes under my hand. Finally, my phone vibrates. On the other side of the handset, my host apologizes and indicates that he is waiting impatiently. I'm going back in great strides to the big cochère door. This time, it opens onto a small courtyard. Then on a flight of stairs that roll to the attic. Arriving upstairs, we open the door.
Rarely, a fire crackles in the fireplace. My host, still confused about having kept waiting in the cold, stirred in all directions, appearing and disappearing at leisure from the living room where he sat. It's a warm room. The exposed beams give relief to the ceiling, large windows let in the sweet rays of the sun. Ambiance sfumato way « by Vinci ». In what seems like a last round trip, we bring me a carafe full of coffee, which I politely refuse. The time to prepare Broceliande tea, the formal interview is delayed by a few minutes. Until the mudwater, we get to know: the polishes are exchanged, the presentations are made. Finally, Michel Ocelot joins me, armed with one last surprise he poses on the coffee table: a tarta from Santiago. Its hospitality warms the grey winter Paris.
Critical look at his latest film
It would be difficult to describe Mr. Ocelot's ways in a few words. At the same time confident of him and capable of a certain self-criticism, he can suddenly lose his gaze, dazzled like a child in front of the beauty of the Sun or remembering the many films he saw. Sometimes he hesitates, thinks at length before saying even one word. On other questions, he answers with opinions that are like truths that cannot be refused. He didn't answer everything, but tried to do the best he could. As we explore his vision of the world of animation, the techniques surrounding it, all interspersed with personal anecdotes and literary digressions, we naturally discuss his latest news, the release and reception of his latest film: LPharaoh, The Wild and The Princess.
A film dissonant in its form (three means-films gathered to form a long one), which may have distracted more than one spectator. In his voice, I feel a note of disappointment, in the face of the relative hermetility of the public in the face of this meeting of tales. A reception that is not shared by distributors, for which the film was able to find an audience beyond their expectations by accumulating more than 600,000 admissions...
Yet, there are three very different stories that enlighten each one in their own way one of the facets of this great storyteller and clearly show the work of an accomplished author. « Pharaoh! » exhales the love of Ocelot, the great civilizations of our past and these suspicions of mysticism that can spice up a story, but also its rigor and respect for history. For this film, an important research work was done upstream with the help of Vincent Rondot, the director of the department of Egyptian antiques of the Louvre. « The Great Wild », for his part, uses the black silhouette, one of his flagship techniques and now inseparable from his filmography. « Princess of the Roses and Prince of the Beignets » carries with it its continuing desire to explore the new terrains that technology offers to animation. Here are three of the many facets by which Michel Ocelot reveals himself and reveals his entire personality as an author.
A film, for which, at the time of the interview, he was preparing to direct the Italian dubbing. An opportunity to explain the difficulties of adaptation. What he calls the search for « synchronous » and « Just ». Finding the balance between natural expressions and original dialogues. A work that turns out to be simpler for the director, when it comes to Italian (which he masteres in the main lines), but for which he must leave the reins with more exotic languages. And this, despite his pleasure in the task.
The Kirikou Revolution
If we have approached other countries in the course of our discussion, it is very quickly that of Kirikou who imposed himself as a necessary passage. Today we have become a milestone in the history of French animation, and we have spoken together about what Kirikou and the Witch, the first trilogy film, released in 1998, may have changed at the time... And it's even a whole world that he managed to revolutionize! We can really talk about a « before » and « after » Kiriku. For industrial reasons first. The release of this film has profoundly altered the functioning of animation in France.
As Michel Ocelot likes to recall, French animation is little present in cinema throughout the 20th century. Only a few films come out, like The King and the Bird Paul Grimault (1980) or The Wild Planet by René Laloux (1973), who remain in the order of the exception. Under the impetus of the French government, animation is only developed in one area: the television series. A universe that does not interest Ocelot and which refuses to work, despite the job offers that he was given.
On several occasions during the interview, he was able to reaffirm his strength of character and his will: to do only what he likes, despite the consequences. Kirikou and the Witch shakes this established order at its exit. Of the few thousand entries expected, the film will eventually surpass the symbolic course of the million. In the eyes of his director, he is a real electroshock that enshrines in the international marble the ability of French animation to produce critical, human and commercial successes.
Doubly commercial success even, as the release of the film is also part of the golden age of the video. The video sales of the first part of Kirikou's adventures exceed those of the current American films. If Kirikou can be seen as a poker hit that has brought big, we must not forget that there is behind the recipes, a critical success, but above all human. This is what Michel Ocelot is talking about with the most emotion. The unexpected behind this great human adventure.
He defines it himself, not as success, worship or fanaticism, but as Love. The one that all those people who saw his movies wear. By hearing these words, one can only imagine the outpouring of tears of happiness, the voices that strangle, the words blocked at the bottom of the throat, the emotion of all these admirers. To hear, this Love seems to me to have a much more valuable value in his eyes than anything else.
It is the satisfaction of a storyteller that he has been able to lure a whole generation. As he continues to tell me about this whole thing, I see sharp and real images scrolling into the bottom of his gaze. And that, without sharing any anecdote. This is also the humility of an artist who does not put himself forward. Who simply welcomed, dressed comfortably and dressed in a casanier sweater-over.
History: the keystone of cinema
While the tea is drunk with small burning sips and the cake is eaten without losing a crumb, we take a step back and approach the animation as a whole. Aspects that differentiate the animated film or not from the actual shooting. However, our discussion diverges and we find ourselves talking about the famous black silhouettes, becoming despite him one of his brands. To explain what fascinates him with these silhouettes, he takes the example of a dog. For the animal, they are nothing. Just empty forms of substance. While in a human, the brain creates emotional intensity through its power of imagination. This is a reference to an important organ for the director, which he quotes several times throughout the interview.
He is the centre of imagination and creation. Where is created and formed the most beautiful stories. History is for him the keystone of cinema; The essential ingredient that can determine by itself whether a film is good or bad. Which is not a surprise, when I look back at the shelves overflowing with stories, plays and other novels. Books that enliven him and provide the ingredients for his own stories.
We finally go back to where we had lost ourselves, in the disparities between animation and real shots. Disparities we will never find: for Ocelot, animation does not differ so much from real shooting. If a certain freedom can feel in the face of the drawing board, the feeling of being able to draw everything without constraints reminds us that the limits lie in each of us. These same risks can and should be taken with the actual shooting. He took Picasso's ambivalent example. The painter fascinates him, because his force of will allowed him to violate all the rules on another side, he finds him dishonest, because he locked himself in his work, where he had broken all the barriers and never took back what Ocelot calls the path of beauty...
A director between shadows and lights
If freedom is supposedly greater in animation, it would like to recall the great strength of real photography: the possibility of shaping light at leisure. A true passion is unleashed when it evokes the subject. His different characteristics, his different aspects: if Ocelot had been another director, he would have been a director of light. An idea that we find in his unique unanimated short film: Pablo Paris Satie. The body and choreography of dancer Pablo Legasa seems to be only a receptacle for capturing and magnifying the razing rays of the sun.
In half a word, Ocelot tells me that if he had to work the light, he should start again small. By making shorts and mediums. He doesn't know if he would have time to relearn a whole grammar of cinema. His mind already seems to bubbling with so many stories that wait only to be drawn... So many choices, opportunities to address.
What is certain, however, is that he will never do twice the same thing. While the interview offered another detour about the recent remake of West Side Story by S. Spielberg, Mr. Ocelot asks me the following question: while the first version of 1961 is so successful, how can we get to reproducing R. Wise's film? The idea could not even have touched his mind. If I allow myself to play the improvised lawyer, speaking in turn of tribute and love letters of the filmmaker, he answers me dryly on his vision of Love, almost cardinal. The emotion that pushes him not to see the films again, for he is fiercely seeking to maintain the original wonder. The first time, when he sat at the bottom of this chair and saw the images simmer in front of him.
If, however, he concedes that a second view can be as good, albeit less impacting, he refuses to do more. He is neither a good customer nor a consumer, but a spectator, always seeking to surpass his previous discoveries. To see the same films tirelessly would be a mess.
Stereo-scams?
In the midst of these theoretical reflections, a particular technology has come back each time, parasitizing all other subjects. He laughs and, according to his opinion, she does not seem to have a future in cinema, despite these incessant returns in recent years: stereoscopy. A technology that he does not criticise without knowing it, as he himself used for his feature film The Night Tales, one of his animated anthologies using his traditional black silhouettes.
At first, she even liked and seduced her, with everything she promised. He says he took pleasure in thinking one of his stories in stereoscopy; have been blotted out by experimenting in a city of science. It is on the occasion of a cinema spring of several of these previous tales, for which a stereoscopic treatment has been applied on certain elements, that it radically changes opinion. A useless addition, worthy of fraud. And, because of this, the desired effect does not work. The functioning of stereoscopy would be slow, as rapid movements do not allow the brain time to assimilate the information in relief.
These are the promises to use technology as a great show mechanics that he seems to point at. Because the inherent speed of this kind of film is counterpoint to this 3D. And when the stereoscopic movement is slow enough for the process to work, Mr. Ocelot considers it to be limited anyway by the turn of the screen. A physical limit that defines for him the world of the film and that the viewer constantly sees. It is then ridiculous for the stereoscopic film to try to free itself from the limits of the depth, while it inevitably remains emulated on its height and width.
Stereoscopy is not made for the world of cinema, but according to him, has much more place in a fair attraction. With humour, he adds that in 2009, a confectionery ad before the first part of Avatar scored much more for his stereoscopy than the film itself.
Limited in its use, stereoscopy does not have the freedom to which Ocelot seems to have always been attached. On several occasions, he briefly evoked the misery he had experienced before Kirikou's success, refusing to force himself to work on projects that did not interest him. He led the hunger and isolation of the country to animate what he wanted, as he wanted. He says it himself, he lacks a quality: know how to sell himself. A way of life that makes it difficult for him to seek funding each time. In this regard, he even refuses to consider making a film produced by a US SVOD platform. He doesn't even want to hear about their taste for forced directives.
A work faced with Anglo-Saxon Puritanism
Moreover, he knows that his universe is not approved by all. While these films receive good feedback during screenings in Anglo-Saxon countries, they are rare. For example, it is impossible to envisage a broadcast of Kirikou on BBC channels. The little boy's zizi and the little girls' breasts don't pass. An English-speaking world which, for him, struggles to imagine an author who does not speak English. A world that needed a film like Kirikou to have the click of the black protagonist. He is convinced of that. If they had the idea before, they had never put it into practice.
After many detours, after having addressed the subject in many aspects, we come back to the main topic of the discussion that animated us: the current status of animation. Kirikou changed everything at one time, but what about today?
Here, Michel Ocelot offers an analogy with the perception of the general public of the universe of comics. While IX art was long seen as reserved for youth production, it eventually received its letters of nobility. To obtain the recognition of a demanding medium that can reach out to more knowledgeable audiences. The animation takes this path, but slower. For him, the biggest obstacle remains financing. The resources and the number of people needed to make an animated film are much more important than for a story in squares. All the talent of the world then remains tied feet and fists, as long as the funds have not been unlocked.
What is certain, however, for Michel Ocelot is that the new status of animation is not ephemeral, but rather reveals an evolution in his performance. The animation is now fashionable, and it will remain so.
This discussion is coming to an end. From now on, Parisian museums are waiting. On the doorstep, we each promise to read these books that have forged us personally. To give us news. All excited about having crossed a course, for having done something new, I rushed down the stairs. The cold instantly picks my face and mixes with my adrenaline. A few minutes later, I left a bookshop, Beaumarchais' theatrical trilogy in my hands.
Thanks again for your contribution, it made me want to (re)dive into his work!
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