The Little Nicholas Meets His Makers in Cannes World Premiere Animation Film

variety.com:

Lise Pedersen “The Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be” by Benjamin Massoubre and Amandine Fredon is having its world premiere at a Special Screening at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20.Several years in the making, the film brings together the world-famous French schoolboy and his creators, author René Goscinny and cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé, as it goes back and forth between their world and his imaginary world.Translated into more than 30 languages, the Little Nicholas short stories have been adapted to fiction but never to animation until now.

For the creative team, it was essential to stay true both to Goscinny’s short stories and to Sempé’s drawings.“The main challenge was to create the Little Nicholas’ world in animation and, at the same time, remain faithful to Sempé’s style – his drawings are very small, they’re made in ink, which gives them a sort of awkward but very lively energy, full of emotion.

We wanted to translate that, but we needed a solid model for the animators to work on, and we had to find a compromise between this very sensitive drawing and a model that we could animate,” explains co-director Amandine Fredon.

The film takes viewers along the creative process that spawned Nicholas. The character gets to meet his creators, who tell him about their life stories.“The whole point of the movie is to show how they created this perfect, funny and poetic world, because they went through some serious traumas in their own lives.