Cyprien Iov is the creator,
voice actor
and producer of the animated series "The Temporal Epic", exclusively on Adult Swim -
Joël Saget / Periple
Each week,
20 Minutes
invites a personality to comment on a social phenomenon in their “
20 Minutes
with…” meeting.
This Friday, Cyprien Iov is releasing the cartoon “The Temporal Epic” of which he is the creator, voice actor and producer, making the series his biggest project to date.
For
20 Minutes
, the Youtubeur who is no longer really one, or not only, looks back on this adventure, the "YouTube game", and its future.
With his 14 million subscribers, nearly 3 billion views, and now "another channel", Cyprien is one of the best known and most influential YouTubers in France.
But that's not all.
He also hosted
Le Rewind
on
20 Minutes
in his early days.
There, it was for the two of the back who did not know.
Cyprien Iov has especially diversified his activities and creations beyond successful videos (Reunions, Ads vs life, Instagrammers), with several short films (including
Minori
shot in Japan), the comic strip
Roger and his humans
, or the MP3 saga
L'Epopée temporelle
, in the spirit of the
Donjon de Naheulbeuk
cult
.
This epic continues today with an animated adaptation of which he is the co-author, voice actor and producer and whose first season (before others?) Is available on Friday on Adult Swim.
Yes,
Rick and Morty's house
.
There is a bunch of magnificent losers there, who have gone to find the inventor of the time machine through the ages, from Nazi Germany to a Mayan city.
A project dear to Cyprien and the opportunity for
20 Minutes
to meet him, he who withdraws from YouTube to invest in other fields, other screens.
Small and big.
Is the cartoon "The Temporal Epic" your biggest project to date?
In terms of budget, time, people met, it is indeed the biggest by far.
There is a difference between producing videos or a 20 minute short film, and producing an entire animated series.
In addition, I have the producer cap on
The Temporal Epic
, which means that each shot has been discussed, verified, validated.
We are talking about 10 months, which is the time to get really attached to the project, to the characters.
There had already been the audio series in 2017. Is this animated version a “simple” adaptation, or perhaps the “real” series, your original vision?
That's a good question, and you are somewhat right.
When I created the audio series, it was a way of being able to make a cartoon without the heavy and expensive production of a "real" cartoon.
Some sound effects and people's imagination did the rest.
It was designed as a cartoon without a picture rather than an audio series.
This does not mean that we are hiding this audio heritage, on the contrary.
The Temporal Epic
has a story, it started in audio, it just has different colors.
If I was asked to do Season 1 again, I wouldn't do it any differently.
The characters, the jokes, the pace, the potential, it was all already there.
We just redid the sound mix, which was originally specific, and spatialized, for listening through headphones.
But that audio heritage leads to some funny things, the narrator is addressed to the "listeners", and we kept it, as the characters tend to describe the scenes, which gives a pretty funny rhythm in animation.
I'm quite a fan.
The merry band of "The Temporal Epic" - Periple
We can feel the influence of “Futurama”, “Rick and Morty” or “South Park”.
I wanted an adventure for people like you, me and my authors, with surprises, gory excess, trash jokes.
So, yeah, there is some kinship with
Rick and Morty
or
South Park
, these shows were showing us where we could put the cursor.
The difference is that on my other projects, I often start with a theme, an idea, to develop a story.
However, there, I told the writers Navo, Yacine Belhousse and François Descraques, to start from the characters: Iris the heroine in temporal Erasmus, Eliot the coffee machine robot, La Buse the pirate and Thomas the geek and naive loser.
This way of writing, with the same rigor as for a cartoon, a live series or any fiction, made it possible to ask the right questions, to keep the best valves.
Did you have other references, perhaps less obvious, for the series?
On the animated series, yes.
We, writers and animators, are familiar with French and American series, but we also watch a lot of Japanese anime.
There are thus quite a few effects, from
color cards
to speed lines, borrowed from Japanese animation.
It surely goes back to
Osamu Tezuka's
Astroboy
, and gives an original rhythm, a little more Japanese, to
The Temporal Epic
.
Your YouTube audience is young, family, and there, we meet a Nazi child in the first episodes!
Ah ah!
In audio but also in animation, with characters that are a little cute, a priori harmless, you can explore more
borderline things
, without falling into bad taste.
A little Nazi child dubbed by Brigitte Lecordier, the voice of Noddy and Gohan, it's still great.
As soon as I told her about it, she was up for it.
All the actors have let go.
Ah yes, there is also Hitler in "The Temporal Epic" - Periple
Patrick Borg, the voice of adult Goku, plays a conquistador who comes up against the Mayas, he made us explode with laughter with proposals more eccentric than the others.
There was already some craziness in the lyrics, things I couldn't quite afford in my YouTube videos, and the dubbers added a layer of that.
Everyone liked the project, everyone added their own stone to the building.
The audio series appealed to several different designers and aesthetics, how did you choose the cartoon one?
I did not hesitate.
In the first season of the audio series, we had 7-8 cartoonists per episode.
However, I had a crush for one of them, the
character designer
Bertrand Todesco.
When I thought about the animated series, I wanted it to be with him.
It was when he accepted, while working for Dreamworks and other studios, that we were able to start production.
If he couldn't, I probably wouldn't have.
It was the style that embodied this adaptation: characters, looks, grimaces, emotions ...
The audio series had started strong, at 5 million views, to end around 600,000 after two seasons.
Were you disappointed?
It's especially interesting in terms of the use of videos, of what may or may not exist on YouTube.
My channel remains my laboratory, where I experiment with things.
I'm not doing it for success or views, otherwise I would be making trending videos, challenges, etc.
The audio series, between the absence of images and the leafing side, that a priori had no place on the platform.
But I posted it anyway, and there are people who followed it, others who stopped, we can say that it has settled down little by little.
So maybe I wouldn't say it's esteem success, but in my opinion it's a real success.
(laughs)
The animated adaptation gives the series a chance again, in another form, under other conditions, and on a dedicated platform.
YouTube is evolving very quickly, it is not necessarily the place of fiction, we go there for other content.
Why did you go to Adult Swim, less known than Canal + or Netlix?
We chatted with different people, but on adult entertainment, Adult Swim is unquestionable.
They have the experience, the requirement, and that offbeat look.
I imagined
The Timeless Epic
between the
Eric André Show
and
Rick and Morty
, rather than next to other children's cartoons.
Adult Swim is a sought-after humor, I'm happy to work with such a platform.
You seem to be using your success on YouTube to decompartmentalize pop culture: trash humor, Japanese animation ...
It's also because I'm not really a YouTuber anymore.
I no longer play the YouTube game so I can go do something else.
If I had kept this label, with regular videos, trendy formats, I would never have been able to start producing a cartoon.
There, I am working on a fiction project, a feature film, which takes me a lot of time.
So I make the choice not to be very active on my channel, I come back to it when I am very inspired.
I need time to explore things, to tell stories.
On Adult Swim, at the cinema or elsewhere.
I even released a mobile game.
I try to exist in different ways.
The transition from the web to TV or the cinema can be difficult, you have experienced it a little with the series "Almost adults" on TF1.
We often imagine that it is one or the other.
However, me, my favorite authors do a lot of different things.
Alain Chabat makes films, comics,
Burger Quiz
, not to mention Les Nuls.
Likewise, Kevin Smith makes films and hosts a podcast.
It is the ideas, and the thoroughness, that prevail over the medium.
After that, you shouldn't try to transpose from one to the other, it doesn't work.
You have to ask yourself questions about the Internet if you work on the Internet, serial if you work on a series, and of course never forget the audience.
But even if I develop a film, I will never in my life stop YouTube.
It's a way for me to express myself, to test formats, to better develop them elsewhere.
Can you say more about this feature film project?
It is a film that I would like to make but it is not necessarily me who chooses.
It's about conveying my ideas through the staging, the characters, rather than embodying it like on YouTube.
I think I prefer.
You know, I'm not that funny in life, because I work a lot.
So, inevitably, at one point, the ideas and the characters are more put forward and prevail over my personality, over my face.
Culture
“Billion Dollar Movie”, “Beef House”… Tim and Eric are the funniest guys in the world and you don't know them
Television
"Animals", "BoJack Horseman", "Rick and Morty" ... Five animated series just for adults
Humor
Animation
Youtube
Series
Cyprien
Culture