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Director: Bibo Bergeron
Release date: October 12, 2011
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
‘Un monstre à Paris’ is a charming and friendly French computer animation film by Bibo Bergeron who not only directed the film, but also wrote both the story and the screenplay.
The film is set in Paris in the winter of 1910 when the river Seine caused an enormous flood in the French capital. During this winter small and timid projectionist Émile and brassy, irresponsible delivery driver and inventor Raoul create a monster by accident. But cabaret singer Lucille discovers that this monster has surprising talents. Meanwhile, arrogant, and ambitious police commissioner Victor Maynott has his own plans with both Lucille, the monster, and the Great Flood. There’s also a proboscis monkey called Charles, who talks with reference cards, an idea that also occurs in Aardman’s ‘The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!’ from a year later.
‘Un monstre à Paris’ knows quite a number of characters and has arguably three main protagonists. But Bergeron plays out his story surprisingly well, giving ample time and background stories to all three of them, even if the one of Raoul and Lucille only arrives during the end titles. The film is very talkative, but not too much so, and has its focus and heart firm in place. The action and drama are further ornamented with several little gags, which never ask too much attention. The best gag may be when Maynott’s balloon starts to lose helium.
In fact, Bergeron envisioned the city of Paris as the film’s main character, and indeed, the movie uses wonderful images of the great city, not only in computer animation, but also by classic matte paintings. Bergeron’s Paris, realized by Sébastian Piquet, is crooked, asymmetrical, and rather ramshackle character, which is always pleasant to look at. In addition, in several scenes the metropolis is clouded in mist, which give the backgrounds and settings an extra poetical atmosphere. Moreover, Bergeron’s Paris is a very, very familiar Paris, also to people who’ve never been there: the film takes mostly place in Montmartre, with the finale taking place on the Eiffel tower, both locations well-known to almost everyone.
Christophe Lourdelet’s character designs are a bit of a mixed bag: the male characters are all firmly rooted in the Franco-Belgian comic tradition, especially Raoul and inspector Pâté. The women Lucille and Maud (Émile’s love interest) on the other hand, have more generic 3D computer animation designs, with all too large eyes and all too slender bodies. The monster is well-designed, being both large and overpowering and delicate and friendly. He looks best when given an Aristide Bruant-like hat and shawl. In that respect the later zoot suit is way off for a film set in 1910.
The animation, directed by Fabrice Joubert, is fair, but not outstanding, and although the film makers are very proud of the dance scenes, the dance moves herein come over as stiff and unnatural. Worse are Lucille’s performances of the song ‘La Seine’. It seems the film makers didn’t know what to do with her long slender arms, which are all over the place. Compare the animation of Lucille with Preston Blair’s animation of Red in e.g., ‘Red Hot Riding Hood’ (1943) and the difference between an approximation of natural movement and natural song and dance animation becomes clear. The effect animation, on the other hand is fine: the water, the clouds and the mist all look very fine.
The songs are quite out of tune with the otherwise faithful 1910 setting, being all too modern and typical products of 2011, not 1910. Composer M (Matthieu Chedid) also provides the monster’s voice, singing in a very high voice, apparently to accentuate the creature’s innocent, childish and fragile nature. Lucille is lovely voiced by Belgian singer Vanessa Paradis of Eurovision Song Contest fame, and her rendering of ‘La Seine’ is very pleasant, even if the song doesn’t sound like a French cabaret song of the 1910s, at all.
In all, ‘Un monstre à Paris’ is not perfect, but certainly well-told and entertaining. The film may be more conventional than contemporary French films like ‘Une vie de chat’ (2010), ‘Le tableau’ (2011) or ‘Ernest & Célestine’ (2012), it still shows the extraordinary rich breeding ground of animation that France has been in the 21st century thus far.
Watch the trailer for ‘A Monster in Paris’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘A Monster in Paris’ is available on Blu-Ray and DVD
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
This short starts with a couple visiting a psychiatrist.
The woman exclaims that her husband is rather cuckoo, so the psychiatrist takes a look inside the husband’s head using a ‘cephaloscope’. As may be expected in an Émile Cohl film what the doctor sees is shown in animation: a series of weird images, tied by Émile Cohl’s trademark metamorphosis.
When the psychiatrist has seen enough, he drills a hole in the man’s skull and pulls out the crazy thoughts, which manifest themselves as more animation on a black screen, much in the vain of Cohl’s debut film ‘Fantasmagorie‘ (1908). Thus the man is saved and the film ends.
Cohl’s stream-of-consciousness way of animating works quite well for a film about craziness, and the framing story is amusing enough to keep the film interesting, even though it’s certainly not one of Cohl’s masterpieces.
Watch ‘Le retapeur de cervelles’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Le retapeur de cervelles’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Stars: Lucien Cazalis
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘Jobard a tué sa belle-mère’ is not an animation film, but one of ten comedy shorts Émile Cohl directed in a collaboration with actor Lucien Cazalis for Pathé.
The ten films all feature the character Jobard, played by Cazalis. It’s a pity that ‘Jobard a tué sa belle-mère’ appears to be the only one to have survived in some quality, because the film shows Cohl’s skills as a live action comedy director. Indeed, the film is a prime example of early French comedy film.
In this episode Jobard scares his mother-in-law to death. Literally. Or so he thinks. So he sets out to buy a wreath, which he loses immediately at a cafe. So he buys a circular bread instead, which he accidentally replaces with a tire. In the end he ends with a cushion, accidentally stolen from the police office.
Lucien Cazalis, who plays Jobard is quite a good comedian, and the film clearly shows that French comedy had a huge influence on American slapstick comedy. It’s a pity Lucien Cazalis has been completely forgotten, today, for he clearly deserves more recognition.
Watch ‘Jobard a tué sa belle-mère’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Jobard a tué sa belle-mère’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘La musicomanie’ opens with a live action sequence in which a man and a woman make music in a small room with instruments that appear and disappear.
Nothing of their antics is remotely interesting, but when the man goes to sleep he dreams of instruments and music notes. The man’s dream is an elegant animated sequence in which Cohl uses his trademark metamorphosis technique, now using instruments as a theme.
As always, Cohl’s stream-of-conscious-like metamorphosis animation is interesting to watch, even though this film brings nothing new. When the woman wakes the man, the film ends.
Watch ‘La musicomanie’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘La musicomanie’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Rating: ★★
Review:
Émile Cohl was an extremely prolific animation artist, virtually responsible for almost the world’s complete animation output of 1908-1910. Thus it doesn’t come as a surprise that not all his films are masterpieces.
For example, ‘Rien n’est impossible à l’homme’ is a rather disjointed gag film about what man can do nowadays. The most interesting scene is the first one, in which we watch a live action street scene from above (supposedly from an airplane, but the camera remains static throughout). Other scenes use cut-out animation to show a diver smoking at the bottom of the sea, or a musician making an obelisk cry.
None of the gags are remotely funny, and the whole film feels like a garbage bag of unrelated gag material, making watching the short a rather tiresome experience.
Watch ‘Rien n’est impossible à l’homme’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Rien n’est impossible à l’homme’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘Monsieur de Crac’ is a short animated gag film in which Mr. Crac (the French name for the Baron von Münchhausen) has some strange adventures, including his half horse drinking from a fountain. Most strange is Mr. Crac’s adventure inside the Etna, where he encounters a multitude of staring faces.
‘Monsieur de Crac’ is solely done in cut-out animation. Cohl’s drawing style often was old-fashioned, but in this film his drawings have a particularly 19th century feel, especially in Cohl’s neat and detailed background art. The drawings are reminiscent of the drawings of 19th century comic masters Wilhelm Busch and Rodolphe Töpffer, and they fit Rudolf Erich Raspe’s classic 1785 story very well.
‘Monsieur de Crac’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Rating: ★★★★
Review:
‘Le mobilier fidèle’ can be translated as ‘The Faithful Furniture’.
This short is a comic live action film in which a man is in love with his furniture, giving it much attention. Unfortunately, the man is too poor to pay the rent, and his furniture is sold on the street. But his pieces of furniture get bored at their new homes, and all return to their former owner, in rather funny scenes using stop motion.
‘Le mobilier fidèle’ is an enormous improvement on J. Stuart Blackton’s moving furniture in ‘The Haunted Hotel’ (1907), and an early example of European comic film art. Two years later, however, the film would be topped by Romeo Bossetti’s ‘The Automatic Moving Company’.
Watch ‘Le mobilier fidèle’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Le mobilier fidèle’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: August 23, 1910
Rating: ★★★
Review:
‘Les quatre petits tailleurs’ is a fairy tale, in which four tailors all desire the heart of the same woman. The woman’s father tells them that the best tailor will win the heart of his daughter, and they are all invited to his house to show him their skills.
The first makes use of a bendable needle, the second doesn’t even need a needle – making the thread doing the work, and the third is so delicate he can even sew the wings of a fly. The fourth tailor works slowly and meticulously. Yet it’s he who completes his task, and it’s him the daughter wants.
‘Les quatre petits tailleurs’ is a live action film, with the tricks of the first three tailors done in stop motion. The film profits from some nice staging, and good comic acting. For example, it’s made clear that the fourth tailor and the woman desire each other even before the contest begins. He’s the only one giving her attention (and a rose) beforehand.
Watch ‘Les quatre petits tailleurs’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Les quatre petits tailleurs’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: June 21, 1910
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
‘Les douze travaux d’Hercule’ is a funny re-telling of the twelve labors of Hercules.
In Émile Cohl’s cut-out film Hercules is a rather fat man with quite a stupid look on his face, and the way in which he does the twelve labors is devoid of all realism. For example, every scene ends with hercules leaving the scene flying. Because of its comic character and silly animation, the film is quite entertaining.
The short even contains a novelty: in ‘la ceinture d’Hyppolyte’ Cohl suggests a fight between Hercules and the Amazones by showing 37 frames of pure abstract shapes, which are held for only 1 to 2 frames, giving the viewer an impression of a series of explosions. This comic device of abstract images suggesting a fight most probably had never been used on the animated screen before. But of course would be repeated in many cartoons after. The cut-out shapes are similar to those of artist Jean Arp, whose much more famous work is of a later date.
Watch ‘Les douze travaux d’Hercule ‘ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Les douze travaux d’Hercule ‘ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: June 18, 1910
Rating: ★★★½
Review:
‘Le tout petit Faust’ is a retelling of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust II using puppet animation.
This is arguably Émile Cohl’s best pure stop-motion film. Although the short is still only comprehensible if you know Goethe’s famous story, it greatly profits from elaborate sets and beautiful background art. There’s even some primitive evocation of emotion during the love scenes between Faust and Margarete. The devilish Mephisto fails to become scary, however, being just a doll just like the other dolls, but in different clothes.
Watch ‘Le tout petit Faust ‘ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Le tout petit Faust ‘ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Rating: ★★
Review:
‘Le champion du jeu à la mode’ is about a company of people, who all try to solve a jigsaw puzzle, until one of the men exclaims that he can solve the puzzle in no time. How he does it is never revealed, but we watch the puzzle assemble itself through stop motion.
Essentially, this is a one trick film, and both the comedy and the animation pale, when compared to Cohl’s contemporary films, like ‘Le placier est tenace’ and ‘Le peintre néo-impressioniste’.
Watch ‘Le champion du jeu à la mode’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Le champion du jeu à la mode ‘ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Rating: ★★
Review:
This animation film uses both cut-out, stop-motion and pen animation in a mix unique to Émile Cohl.
Nevertheless ‘L’enfance de l’art’ is among Cohl vaguest and least impressive films: things are just happening on the screen, like a monster disturbing a painter or some monsters drawn on human hands. We can also watch some morphing images of animals and more monsters. In this respect the title is well chosen…
Watch ‘L’enfance de l’art’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘L’enfance de l’art ‘ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Rating: ★★★★½
Review:
‘Le peintre néo-impressioniste’ is a pure comedy film by cinema pioneer Émile Cohl.
This short is about a painter who cannot even draw a live model (his painting is that of a stick man). When a client arrives the talentless painter tries to sell his monochrome paintings to a client, exclaiming that they are all figurative. For example, the red painting involves a cardinal eating lobster at the red sea, and the green one shows a green devil playing billiards in the grass, while drinking absint.
The imaginary pictures are all shown in cut-out animation, and the colors are beautifully rendered by hand coloring. In the end the client buys them all, leaving the painter and his model laughing.
Watch ‘Le peintre néo-impressioniste’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Le peintre néo-impressioniste’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: 1910
Rating: ★★½
Review:
In this film several objects make paintings on an empty canvas, which all turn into photos and films.
Cohl suggests the act of painting by several means, for example by taking away layers op paper snippers or taking away sand to reveal a picture beneath. There’s no story, and in a way this pure animation film is still in the tradition of the trick film, in which the viewer is more concerned with how the trick is done than the actual images themselves. Thus, the film is most interesting because of the nice footage of Paris anno 1910.
Watch ‘Les beaux-arts mystérieux’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Les beaux-arts mystérieux’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: May 24, 1910
Rating: ★
Review:
‘Cadres fleuris’ is one of the least comprehensible and most boring of Cohl’s tableau films.
In this film the frames themselves are much more elaborate than the images inside the frames, which are reduced to a small part of the screen. There’s some cut-out animation, and some stop-motion, but the purpose of the film remains utterly puzzling, especially when some portraits of contemporary world leaders (e.g. Kaiser Wilhelm II and Czar Nicholas II) come along.
With the best of will one can see this film as an early forerunner of the abstract animation experiments of the 1920s and 1930s by Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Oskar Fischinger. Anyway, ‘Cadres fleuris’ was Cohl’s last venture into the tableau film, a genre which in the early 1910s quickly became obsolete, anyhow.
Watch ‘Cadres fleuris’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Cadres fleuris’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: May 21, 1910
Rating: ★★★
Review:
In this film the waiter of a cafe falls asleep during work, and dreams of glasses, bottles, wine, beer and absint all haunting him.
As may be expected in an Émile Cohl film the dream sequence is done in animation, in a quite remarkable blend of cut-out and pen animation. Cohl uses his trademark metamorphosis technique and imagination to make all kinds of associations with alcohol, in a rather directionless sequence. But as this is supposed to be a dream, this stream-of-consciousness-like approach works pretty well.
In the end, the waiter is awoken by four card-playing guests, who spray spray water on the hapless victim.
Watch ‘Le songe du garçon de café’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Le songe du garçon de café’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: April 28, 1910
Rating: ★
Review:
Émile Cohl’s ventures into stop-motion form the weakest part of his prolific output, and ‘Le petit Chantecler’ is no exception.
The film is told in four acts, but it remains utterly inexplicable what happens on the screen. For the most part we just watch stiff statues of roosters, chickens, chicks, a pheasant, a pig, some ducks, and even eggs move in front of an equally static backdrop painting.
There’s an obvious suggestion of story, but it’s completely lost on the audience. Only with the arrival of Władisław Starewicz, and his groundbreaking film ‘The Cameraman’s Revenge‘ (1912), there would arise a real master of the stop motion medium.
Watch ‘Le petit Chantecler’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Le petit Chantecler’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Director: Émile Cohl
Release Date: February 19, 1910
Rating: ★★
Review:
In ‘Le Binetoscope’ a clown presents some kind of apparatus that absorbs something from the audience and puts it on the screen.
This idea is an excuse for some animation, first shown on a screen behind the (live action) clown, but after two minutes filling the complete movie screen. In this sequence Cohl uses his metamorphosis technique on faces. He even changes a complete alphabet into faces. Then the clown returns to take a bow.
Cohl’s metamorphosis technique remains always interesting to watch, and it’s clever how he uses pen animation and cut-out together in this film, but his pictures in ‘Le Binettoscope’ aren’t too remarkable, and pale when compared to some of his 1909 films like ‘Les générations comiques‘ or ‘Les transfigurations‘.
Watch ‘Le Binetoscope’ yourself and tell me what you think:
‘Le Binetoscope’ is available on the DVDs ‘Émile Cohl – L’agitateur aux mille images’
Dr. Grob's Animation Review 