With 2 French animated features in the running at the Oscars, columnist Andrew Osmond looks at anime’s impact on France and vice versa, from ‘Lupin’ to Daft Punk.
This week, I’ll look at anime’s links to French animation, prompted by the imminent Oscar ceremony on March 16. There are no Japanese entries in the Best Animated Features shortlist. But there are two animated features from France – Arco, directed by Ugo Bienvenu, and Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, directed by Mailys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han.
Both films have been compared to anime by reviewers, especially to the works of Ghibli. Some commonalities are obvious. Arco’s time-travel story is an eco-fantasy, revolving around the impact of climate change. Amélie is set in Japan, and its main thread is the love between the title Belgian infant and her Japanese nanny who becomes a second mother to her.
Having seen both Arco and Amélie, I’d play down the anime comparisons, which can be unfairly reductive. For instance, I’ve seen Amélie linked to Totoro because both films foreground infant girls. However, the bond between Amélie and her nanny feels very different – though no less magic and loving – than that between the toddler Mei and her big sister Satsuki in Totoro.
But there’s certainly a broad affinity between both French films and Ghibli, while Amélie has a link with a particular Ghibli title. The child persuades her reluctant nanny Nishio to tell her about World War II, when Nishio lost her family in the bombing of Kobe. Beyond Nishio’s spoken words, her experience is conveyed through images of the meal she’s making – a pan bubbling on an oven, falling rice that evokes a live burial. The indirectness is haunting and poetic.
The same bombing raid was depicted in Ghibli’s film Grave of the Fireflies, directed by Isao Takahata. He experienced a similar raid on Okayama; he was nine at the time, running through the flames with his sister.
The King and the Bird
Still a youngster in the 1950s, Takahata became obsessed with an imported French film released under the name The Cross-Eyed Tyrant. In France it was called The Shepherdess and the Sweep, a refined fairy tale by Paul Grimault. Takahata later spoke of how he was given chills by the evil king in the film, who dispatches unwanted people by dropping them down trapdoors to nowhere. The film made Takahata want to make films with a “profound sense of character and humanity,” and so he entered his animation career.
Yasuo Otsuka, who’d be one of Takahata’s most important mentors, also found the film inspirational, as did Hayao Miyazaki. Animation Obsessive recounts how Shepherdess became a training tool for the artists at the Toei Animation studio. For instance, Otsuka studied how the film modulated frame rates in character animation. Shepherdess and the Sweep is set around a castle the size of a city, surely the basis for all the giant fantasy edifices in Miyazaki’s films. Think of Spirited Away’s bath-house, or the castle of the birds in The Boy and the Heron.
Grimault would later take back his film and revise it, incorporating new animation, as The King and the Mockingbird. Released in 1980, this version superseded its predecessor, and was released on Japanese video by the Ghibli Museum Library. Both trailers in this article show the revised version. But even in its compromised form, Grimault’s film had enthralled a generation of Japanese animators. (Miyazaki vociferously preferred the original.)
Ulysses 31
By the time the revised King and the Mockingbird was released, a torrent of anime had reached French TV, far more diverse than in America or Britain. Exports of the ‘70s and ‘80s included the giant robot show Goldorak (renamed from Grendizer, from the comics of Go Nagai); Candy Candy (the adventures of a plucky orphan girl); Jeanne et Serge (a girls’ volleyball series, called Attacker You! in Japan); The Knights of the Zodiac (renamed from Saint Seiya, about superpowered boys); and Princess Sarah (from the novel “A Little Princess”).
Amid such exports, Jean Chalopin of the French production company DIC saw an opportunity. Whether he knew it or not, he was following in the footsteps of America’s Arthur Rankin; I told his story recently. Chalopin approached the anime studio TMS, pitching a series to play in both Japanese and French markets. He later told Britain’s Guardian newspaper that he went for a story “that was Goldorak-ish in a universe that was French-acceptable.”
The result was Ulysses 31, broadcast in France in 1981, which turned Homer’s Odyssey into a space adventure. Unlike the exports above, it crossed the English Channel and was watched by a generation of British youngsters, myself included. Chalopin created the story, in which the warrior-king Ulysses (called Odysseus in the original Greek and in the upcoming Christopher Nolan film) is recast as the bearded 31st-century captain of a doughnut-shaped spaceship. Ulysses falls foul of the ancient Greek gods after saving his young son Telemachus from the Cyclops (a life-draining giant robot in this version, though still with a vulnerable eye).
The angry deities sentence Ulysses to wander among unknown stars, accompanied by Telemachus, a blue-skinned girl called Yumi and the hapless mini-robot Nono. Some episodes hold up far better than others, but the best are highly evocative, lifted by funky music, psychedelic visuals, and the creators’ fantasy vision. “The Eternal Punishment” harshly retells the Sisyphus legend; “Before the Flood” has a counterpart Earth of winged beings; “The Seat of Forgetfulness” is beautifully dreamlike; and “Strange Meeting” sends the hero back in time to aid his Homeric ancestor.
Ulysses’ craft the Odyssey would have been the envy of an Enterprise captain. The control bridge was awash with flashing lights, overseen by an AI (Shirka) with a mellifluous female voice. The show’s design involved French artist Philippe Bouchet, aka Manchu, along with Japan’s Shingo Araki, who designed the anime Saint Seiya. I loved the Ulysses 31 myself, not least for a particular satisfaction rare in TV cartoons in Britain back then: not only did the show have a definite beginning, it had a conclusive end (“The Kingdom of Hades”).
An unmade Lupin
Following Ulysses 31, DIC planned to transpose another iconic character into space adventures. This time, it would have been Lupin, who’d already had multiple lives in France and Japan. The first Lupin - Arsène Lupin, to give his full name - was a fictional “gentleman thief” created in the 1900s by the French author Maurice Leblanc. His stories had little circulation in English but were enormous in France and Japan. The recent French live-action Lupin series on Netflix updates the character, making him an Afro-French youth who models himself on Leblanc’s character.
However, Lupin had been updated in Japan decades earlier, as the globetrotting rogue Lupin the Third. He was created in manga by Monkey Punch in 1967, and then had a long anime career beginning in the 1970s – I wrote more on him here. DIC’s plan for Lupin borrowed very obviously from “Lupin the Third,” though it would have been made French-acceptable once again.
DIC’s proposed series would have been called Arsene and Cie in France and Lupin VIII elsewhere (that is, Lupin the Eighth). The series would have featured space-age versions of not just Lupin but other characters from Lupin the Third – Jigen, Goemon, Fujiko and Inspector Zenigata. (All these characters were Monkey Punch’s creations, with no equivalents in Leblanc’s stories.) However, the series would have had no sex or edgy violence, with Lupin himself no longer a thief but a private detective, romping round space citadels.
Like Ulysses 31, the series would have been a collaboration between DIC and the TMS studio, also the home of Lupin the Third. Lupin VIII went into full animation, with one episode animated in full. As of writing, silent footage and amateur dubs can be found online. A major name was involved, the vaunted Rintaro, who’d directed the film version of Galaxy Express 999 a few years earlier.
Lupin VIII was cancelled, due to an issue which hadn’t affected Lupin the Third in Japan but often affected its export. There were legal wrangles with the Leblanc estate over the use of Lupin’s name – highly ironic, as Leblanc himself had shamelessly pilfered Britain’s Sherlock Holmes in his stories! (LeBlanc’s Lupin entered the public domain in 2012.)
The Road to El Dorado
Lupin fell through, but DIC still released another Japanese collaboration in France in 1982, The Mysterious Cities of Gold. This didn’t involve TMS but the similarly prolific Studio Pierrot (whose credits run through Urusei Yatsura and Bleach) and the lesser-known MK. The chief Japanese director, Hisayuki Toriumi, had taken the same role on the 1972 action series Gatchaman – another “hidden” anime export, re-edited in English as Battle of the Planets.
Cities followed three kids – the boys Esteban and Tao, and the girl Zia – as they sought the titular cities in South America in the 16th century, clambering through jungles, mountains, and ancient temples. I liked it less than Ulysses 31. The kids’ puzzle-solving journey was infuriatingly protracted over 39 episodes; the comic relief was irksome (especially a chatterbox parrot); and the effective scenes were far between.
The highlights often involved the series’ sci-fi elements, blithely dropped into the story: a mechanized, solar-powered sailing ship, a golden condor plane and – if you made it to the last episodes - a hidden super-civilization.
While I wasn’t a fan of the show, it had fervent followers in Britain. In an important way, it went further than Ulysses 31. The earlier show’s episodes were mostly self-contained, but Cities of Gold was a serial with an unfurling story, common in Japan. Cities also had an educational remit, teaching kids about South American culture and ancient civilizations. A live-action segment at the end of each episode showed how the action was based in reality. However, these segments were cut in Britain’s BBC broadcast; so much for public service broadcasting!
Cities would return 30 years later, this time as a French-made CG show without Japanese involvement. Remarkably, this new series wasn’t a reboot but a direct continuation of the story. This suggests either the original was still circulating to children in France three decades on, or that there were enough adult Cities of Gold fans who wanted more, though the continuation was still a children’s show.
Animated by the Blue Spirit studio in Angouleme, the 2011 season took the kids to China, (though it may never be shown in China, thanks to one storyline celebrating Tibet). Reviewing the new show, I found it agreeable and sometimes better than the original, with varied adventures and an exciting climax answering 30-year-old questions. However, some fans plainly hated the CG look – the characters are cartoony and expressive but still evoke videogame sprites.
Cities of Gold continued in France for two more seasons in the 2010s, taking the characters onward to Japan and Africa. I wouldn’t mind seeing them, but the later seasons reportedly had almost no Anglophone exposure. I wonder if they ever reached Japan.
Daft Punk and Interstella 5555
By the time Cities of Gold returned in 2011, there’d been other major Franco-Japanese collaborations. One popular export to French TV in the 1970s was a space adventure called Albator – at least it was called that in France, though its Japanese name was Captain Harlock. The space hero was one of the star characters created by the manga artist Leiji Matsumoto, who I profiled here.
Albator was watched by two French boys, Thomas Bangalter and Guy Manuel de Honem-Christo, who first saw it when they were around five years old. They hadn’t met at the time, but they’d later remember anime as a shared experience. “I think that is one of the biggest memories for us and many French people our age… [The anime we saw] are all magical to us now that we are grown-ups.”
Years later, after the pair formed the music duo Daft Punk, they approached Matsumoto with the idea of making animated videos in his style to complement their second album, Discovery. The result was a series of music videos, including Digital Love below, and the feature-length film Interstella 5555: The Story of the 5ecret 5tar 5ystem. They were made by Toei Animation, which had animated Captain Harlock, Galaxy Express 999 and other Matsumoto strips.
Matsumoto was credited for original design and supervision, but the film can be seen as less a Matsumoto film than a Matsumoto tribute, not least to the effect he’d had on two French children.
Oban Star-Racers
Another future French creator loved anime as child - Savin Yeatman-Eiffel, whose great-grandfather built some tower or other. When I interviewed him in 2007, he said, “The strongest thing about these series was that they were filled with emotion. Whether the situation was funny or sad, the way that the characters were depicted on screen really made the audience feel something. When I conceived Oban Star-Racers, I drew on my memories of these series: simple character relationships and conflicts, but with depths to the characters that we discover as we go on.”
Oban Star Racers originated as a short film in 2001, Molly Star Racer by Yeatman-Eiffel’s studio, Sav! The World Productions. It was nominated for an award at the Monte Carlo festival Imagina. The event was covered in Japan by the public broadcaster NHK, which featured Molly in its report. That in turn was noted by the corporation Bandai Visual, which would partner with the Tokyo studio HAL FilmMaker to make the short into a series. Yeatman-Eiffel and his French team moved to HAL FilmMaker for three years, while the show’s 3D work was handled by Pumpkin-3D in France.
Oban Star-Racer’s heroine, Molly, enters an intergalactic tournament where low-flying vehicles skim a range of alien landscapes. Yeatman-Eiffel had to fight for the Molly character as he saw her. Some potential French investors argued that a girl lead wouldn’t appeal to boys, and even in Tokyo Yeatman-Eiffel found Japanese staff rewriting the scenario behind his back, to give Molly magic powers.
“I had to show them that if I said I was the director, it was not just to look good on my card,” Yeatman-Eiffel said. He learned to keep the reins tight when it came to the overall vision of the show, while mixing Japanese and French expertise to realize the backgrounds, characters, and colors. Loic Penon, who designed some Oban characters, had experience in underground comics. Series co-director Thomas Romain and background designer Stanislas Brunet were both graduates of the animation school Gobelins.
“We worked as hard as the Japanese did – six days minimum a week, for 15 hours a day of more,” Yeatman-Eiffel said. “But then when you show them your designs and storyboards, that’s when you show them you’re there for a reason and start earning their respect. After a few months, things started to go much more smoothly, though it was still very tiring. I was writing the scripts, correcting the storyboards, and doing the editing, with a producer’s responsibilities on top of that. But it was very exciting seeing a project that I had envisioned for so long becoming a reality.”
Molly’s magic powers were discarded, though in an echo of the French investors’ objections to a girl, the series was presented in a markedly masculine way in America. Compare the American titles (below) with how the show appeared elsewhere (above). The song in the non-American version was created by the famed Japanese musician Yoko Kanno, who’d written the music for Cowboy Bebop.
In the story, Molly clashes with her gruff team manager, Don Wei, who thinks she’s not cut out to be a racer. Unknown to her, the Earth’s fate depends on her winning. Unknown to him, Molly is his abandoned daughter. I loved the show for this central dramatic irony (with Molly knowing full well that Don Wei is her dad). Much of the fun comes from seeing Molly inflict her teen rebellions on her unknowing parent, seeing how uncompromising they both are, and wondering when the penny will drop for poor Don Wei. It’s worth the wait.
From a commercial viewpoint, though, the device might have been a problem. When Oban debuted in 2006, serial stories were still unusual in TV cartoons outside Japan, though Last Airbender had started the year before. Any viewer who missed Oban’s first episode might well not have picked up on the show’s real conflict. Perhaps it was a rare case when a clunky repeated voice-over (“My father doesn’t know who I am”) might have been justified.
Still, I raved in my magazine review. “Oban Star-Racers feels like what Evangelion – another saga about estranged parents and angry teens – might have been like had it been directed with the hopeful vision of Hayao Miyazaki.”
… And the rest
There’ve been many later entanglements between French animation and anime. I’ve covered some in other articles (linked), such as the Ghibli-produced film The Red Turtle, which was directed by the Dutch auteur Michael Dudok de Wit and animated at France’s Prima Linea studio, with the fervent support of Takahata. Then there’s last year’s CG steampunk series Leviathan, animated by Japan’s Orange studio, whose French director was another Gobelins graduate, Christophe Ferrerai.
There’ve also been several anime-adjacent titles, such as the 2021 mountaineering drama Summit of the Gods, a French animated film from a manga by Baku Yumemakura. The 2022 French film Blind Woman, Sleeping Willow was adapted from short stories by the Japanese author Haruki Murakami. Reviewing it, I found it an acquired taste, but “bizarrely, sadly enjoyable.” The film is of particular interest to fans of Japan’s Makoto Shinkai, sharing elements with his 2022 blockbuster anime Suzume. I explain all that here.
As I mentioned when discussing Trigun recently, a couple of French-animated action series have challenged anime directly. The acclaimed 2023 series Blue Eye Samurai on Netflix was made by the Blue Spirit Studio, which previously made the 2010s reprisals of Mysterious Cities of Gold. Then there were the stunning visual achievements of Arcane: League of Legends by the Fortiche studio – I reviewed the first season here.
Beyond the Oscar nominees Arco and Little Amélie, there are many more French animated features with broader affinities with anime. Reviewing Mamoru Hosoda’s Scarlet recently, I found my mind drawn back to the eccentric fantasies of French director René Laloux, such as Fantastic Planet and Time Masters. To be pedantic, though, Laloux’s films were animated in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, respectively.
You can also count the family films of Michel Ocelot, another French director whose work enchanted Takahata. The Ghibli director oversaw the Japanese dubs of Ocelot’s films Kirikou and the Sorceress and Azur and Asmar. More recently, there’ve been April and the Extraordinary World (2015), a wonderful steampunk yarn, and the gritty sci-fi thriller Mars Express (2023). The latter shares much with Ghost in the Shell.
I wish Arco and Little Amélie well on Oscar night, but whether one of them wins or not, the interplay between French animation and anime will continue regardless. After all, even the French President, Emmanuel Macron, is an anime fan…
