Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be (Schools)

In this Annecy Best Feature–winning adaptation of France’s famed Le petit Nicolas comic book series, a mischievous character meets the men who brought him to life.

Simple line sketches fill with colour as ideas blossom, and soft-hued watercolours render a Paris from a bygone era. Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be astutely envisions what happens when the art meets his artists, weaving young Nicholas’s escapades with the backstories of cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé and writer René Goscinny, who conjured his world. Blending biography and origin story, the film reveals how tales of the character’s carefree youth – pranks at summer camp and being grossed out by girls – emerged from his creators’ experiences of war and troubled childhoods.

Sempé and Goscinny (the latter of whom also co-created Astérix) met in 1950s Paris, where they dreamed up the charming figure that would become the subject of a much-loved series of comics. Co-written by Goscinny’s daughter, Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre’s film – which has also taken home accolades from Bucheon and Cambridge, and was nominated at Cannes and France’s César Awards – employs two distinct yet equally memorable animation styles to collide ‘reality’ and representation. But it’s more than a nostalgia-tinted reprisal of the comics: it reveals the power of the imagination to challenge the imperfections of the world.