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Le fils Courge vit dans la forêt avec son père, colosse tyrannique qui lui interdit d'en sortir. Un jour, il est pourtant obligé de se rendre en ville...
Le fils Courge vit au cœur de la forêt, élevé par son père, un colosse tyrannique qui y règne en maître et lui interdit d'en sortir. Ignorant tout de la société des hommes, le garçon grandit en sauvage, avec pour seuls compagnons les fantômes placides qui hantent la forêt. Jusqu’au jour où il est obligé de se rendre au village le plus proche. Il y fait la rencontre de la jeune Manon qui va bouleverser sa vision des choses.
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JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DESSAINT: THE DAY OF CROWS (2012) A boy emerges from the woods and finds amourThe Day of Crows/Le jour des corneil
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DESSAINT: THE DAY OF CROWS (2012)
A boy emerges from the woods and finds amourThe Day of Crows/Le jour des corneilles (AKA "The Day of the Crows") is a hand-drawn animated film helmed by Jean-Christophe Dessaint, his first direction of a feature; he has workked on an animated TV series and was assistant director under Antoine Delesvaux and Joann Sfar of the much-admired (and César-winning) Rabbi's Cat (ND/NF 2012). This script is by Amandine Taffin, adapting from Jea-François Beauchemn's French Canadian novel depicting a boy known to himself and his father only as "Fils" or Son (Lorànt Deutsch), who has been raised like a wild child in the woods by his bitter, fearsome and tyrannical father, known as "Courge" (Pumpkin) (Jean Reno). Events lead Son out of this harsh, feral existence into a world of kindness and love. This is a sweet story with many little delights to the eye. Things change for Son after his father is badly injured in a fall and the boy, going against his father's admonitions in the past but urged on by half-human half-animal spirits that are his guardians, drags his father out of the forest into the "Other World." This leads the boy to a little town -- we appear to be in rural France in the Twenties or Thirties -- where he lugs his dad to seek help. There is a small military HQ and across from it a hospital. Though Son knows nothing of civilization he manages to get help from the benevolent Doctor (the late Claude Chabrol; his final film credit), who operates on Pumplin's broken leg. Thus Son meets a girl of his own age, Manon (Isabelle Carré), daughter of the Doctor, whom he's sent to play with during his father's surgery and from whom he beings to learn more about the real world. By Manon's side Son discovers love and civilization, and begins to seek out where his father's love for him also may be hidden, because Son believes it must be somewhere. Eventually the story behind Pumpkin's bitterness and his fanatical avoidance of the village emerges. When crows come into the story -- with Son communicating with one he helps, following the model of kindness learned from the Doctor -- bird also become helpers and friends, instead of being only killed for food (by Pumpkin) or for sport (by the brutes of the military HQ). In style The Day of Crows somewhat evokes the animations of s Hayao Miyazaki, a link perhaps heightened by the frequent appearance of anthropomophic animal figures. These gentle guiding spirits, half ghosts of the living, half animal spirits of the forest, become protectors and guides for Son and also for Manon and in a sense for Pumpkin. This is an authentic children's fantasy that draws us into its own world rather than providing easy parallels or moral lessons for everyday life. Day of the Crows is a film out of Canada but is a Canada/Belgium/France/Luxembourg production. It depicts a struggle between a magical world that's also the wild and feral world and a more real and everyday one, and, obviously, a search for love.Day of the Crows , 96 mins., debuted at San Sebastian. Hollywood Reporter writer Neil Young, who reviewed it in detail but not altogether favorably, felt this film "isn't quite distinctive enough to stand out in an environment so jam-packed with flashier computer-animated rivals." Well, this labor of love about about love will appeal precisely to all those who are tired of the endlessly cranked-out Pixar et al. computer-generated pictures. Young sees links with f Shrek and Truffaut's The Wild Child - even M Night Shyamalan´s The Village and, in the final third sees parallels with Ken Loach's Kes -- and he notes that while the forest and valley landscape drawings and even the village have a lush period quality, Son and Manon are drawn in a more contemporary way; he sees Son as not unlike a figure in "Peanuts." This is all true, though Son is a distinctive and very lively character who comes across very different from a comic strip in these rich settings. The film was released in France and Belgium in October 2012. It may be even more appreciated in Canada, with those who know the original story. But as Young says, on TV and DVD it may have a great future in many French-speaking countries. All the voices are well done, with Carré and Deutsch cute and appealing, Reno appropriately resonant and gruff, and Chabrol warm and mellow. Bruno Podalydès is present voicing a nurse and another character. This is a finely crafted piece of work whose story line -- more important than its drawing -- is fresh and interesting. I wish I could have seen it when I was eight or ten. This is a resonant myth for children, one worth remembering. Le jour des corneilles, 96mins., opened in France October 24, 2012 to excellent reviews (Allociné press rating 3.9 based on 20 reviews). Screened for this review as part of the joint Unifrance-Film Society of Lincoln Center series, Rendez-Vous with French Cinema, where it will play Sat., Mar. 9, 1:00pm at the Walter Reade Theater. It becomes available in France on DVD and Blu-ray March 6, 2013.
Jean Reno and the late Claude Chabrol lend their voices to Jean-Christophe Dessaint's animated adaptation of the novel by Jean-Fran&cce
Jean Reno and the late Claude Chabrol lend their voices to Jean-Christophe Dessaint's animated adaptation of the novel by Jean-François Beauchemin.
An animated fable that may charm patient younger children, The Day of the Crows (Le Jour des corneilles) is of chief interest for adults as the final credit for Nouvelle Vague legend Claude Chabrol, who recorded his vocal contribution not long before his death in September 2010. While skilfully executed using old-school hand-drawn techniques, this adaptation of a 2005 novel by Québécois writer Jean-François Beauchemin otherwise isn't quite distinctive enough to stand out in an environment so jam-packed with flashier computer-animated rivals.
Release in France and Belgium is set for October 24, though commercial prospects are probably brightest in Beauchemi's native Canada. This directorial debut from Jean-Claude Dessaint could enjoy a healthy small-screen afterlife on TV and DVD, especially in French-speaking territories. Well received when world premiering at Annecy´s influential animation festival in June, it will reap plentiful bookings at similar events and the Chabrol 'USP' will also guarantee a certain level of exposure at more general festivals.
The vast majority of Chabrol's own features were unmistakeably French from root to branch, but Dessaint and scripwriter Amandine Taffin take considerable pains to avoid geographical specifics. So while much of the action unfolds in what looks, sounds and feels like rural France in the 1920s or 1930s, the picture also has one foot in the realms of timeless fairytales.
Combining elements of Shrek and Truffaut's The Wild Child - with touches of M Night Shyamalan´s The Village and, in the final third, Ken Loach's Kes - the story focuses on the ogre-like ‘Pumpkin’ (voiced by Jean Reno) who has raised his semi-feral young son (Lorànt Deutsch) in an isolated forest hut. The nameless lad has been raised in ignorance and fear about the mysterious 'World Beyond.'
But after his father is badly injured in a fall, Junior intrepidly ventures outside the forest´s cozy confines for the first time. Encountering civilization in the form of the village which Pumpkin fled years before, the undomesticated boy seeks help from the local doctor (Chabrol) and is given a crash-course in "normal" living by the doctor´s young daughter Manon (Isabelle Carré).
Despite its title, The Day of the Crows lacks significant corvine involvement until after an hour has passed, when our young, slingshot-wielding hero finds and spares a critter who duly becomes his faithful feathered friend. This chummy crow is even able to approximate speech via expressive cawing, and the delightfully engaging boy-bird business might profitably have been expanded.
Dessaint and Taffin are rather more interested in resolving the stormy relationship between Pumpkin and his child, which involves flashbacks explaining the family´s tragic backstory, and interventions from the friendly, half-human, half-animal "spirits" of the forest - who include the boy´s late, now fawn-headed mother. Such mute, anthropomorphized presences endow proceedings with a visual flavor of Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki's creations, though Dessaint - who worked on 2011's Cesar-winning The Rabbi's Cat - largely sticks to a more conventional approach.
As supervised by artistic director Patrice Suau, backgrounds are lush and colorful in the style of 19th century French landscape painting - more Manet than Monet. By contrast the human characters, especially Pumpkin's scrawny, antenna-haired son and the t-shirt-sporting Manon, have a much more contemporary look, and indeed wouldn´t look massively out of place in a Peanuts cartoon. Simon Leclerc´s lively score strikes largely familiar notes in a production which pays faithful homage to its creative forebears without quite establishing a fresh voice or mythology of its own.
The lengthy period of production and post-production, par for the course with such animations, is meanwhile indicated not only by Chabrol's warm posthumous performance but also by a Pixar-style end-roll list of nearly thirty new arrivals.
Good character animation, strong voice thesping and a fully engrossing storyline elevate “Day of the Crows” well above the usua
Good character animation, strong voice thesping and a fully engrossing storyline elevate “Day of the Crows” well above the usual run of animated kid-friendly fare. Charming without undue whimsy, expressive without inordinate schmaltz, and dealing with the true stuff of fairy tales — death, unloving parent figures and hostile social forces — Jean-Christophe Dessaint’s wild-child-themed toon sends a feral youngster into a real world whose existence he never suspected. Opting for the airily fantastic in an age of big-budget, CGI-enhanced hyperrealism, this hand-drawn pic could captivate children and adults alike, meriting an original-language arthouse run.
Adapted from Jean-Francois Beauchemin’s novel, the story follows a nameless kid (voiced by Lorant Deutsch), scrawny and nearly “Rugrats”-style-bald, bounding through the forest on all fours with lightning reflexes and a cheerful willingness to be guided by his hulking, growling, barbaric giant of a father, Pumpkin (Jean Reno). Luckily, the boy’s sentimental education is supplemented by apparitions from “the world beyond,” silent beings with animal heads but human hands and bodies. His spiritual advisers include the loving, doe-headed spirit of his dead mother and a wise, cat-faced gentleman by a riverbank.
When Pumpkin breaks his leg, the boy is nudged by his otherworldly friends to leave the forest. Having been told all his life he would disappear if he set foot outside its borders, he nevertheless sets out, dragging his unconscious father behind him, winding up in a nearby village whose inhabitants recoil from his odoriferous person. He is taken in by the kindly village doctor (Claude Chabrol, in a role undertaken shortly before his death), who fends off angry villagers led by the vindictive Mme. Bramble (Chantal Neuwirth). The townfolk, who in their fear-filled venom appear to have come straight out of an Henri-Georges Clouzot film, have recognized in Pumpkin an old enemy (something referenced in the stormy nighttime sequence that opens the picture).
Only the doctor and his young daughter, Manon (Isabelle Carre), are on the side of the angels. Dessaint (who served as assistant director on “”The Rabbi’s Cat”) lavishes the film’s best character animation and dialogue on the two kids as they gradually develop mutual affection and protectiveness. The wild boy’s socialization is seen from Manon’s perspective as she assumes responsibility for the kid’s integration, obsessing over proper nose-blowing techniques while completely missing other aspects of his unfamiliarity with civilization. When he first glimpses himself in a mirror, his expressions pass rapidly through puzzlement, trepidation, recognition and pleasure as his reflected image mimics his movements. Unfortunately, animated films with such subtle behavioral niceties and occasional graphic experimentation (such as with the enchanted forest’s pastoral watercolor look) buck enormous odds in a studio-dominated toon market.
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