Michel Ocelot would not have missed the 60th Annecy Festival for anything in the world, especially since an exhibition is dedicated to him between the walls of the very beautiful castle of the city.
A nasty fall from a ladder, at his place just before, will have wanted otherwise.
His works in any case are there, until October 11, under the title
Michel Ocelot, artificer of the imagination
.
We discover his first paintings, his storyboards and his famous cut-outs, very white pastry lace with black silhouettes.
A technique inspired by the
Adventures of Prince Ahmed
by the German pioneer Lotte Reiniger (1929), in a very assertive style for someone who, paradoxically, confides in the exhibition: "my ideal would be not to have a style".
He pulled off a blockbuster while remaining himself
We also see his “first official work” for television, the duck
Gédéon
adapted from Benjamin Rabier, in the early 1970s, and his princes and princesses, already, with his dragons. Until the surprise success of
Kirikou
, awarded at the Annecy Festival in June 1999. “Michel Ocelot has never done anything in his life but draw, animate images, and he is someone who, without looking for him, managed to make a blockbuster while remaining himself, explains to
20 Minutes
the former artistic director of the festival Serge Bromberg, who selected him in 1999. Michel managed to meet the public without ever compromising on his style or on his stories. This is what makes its strength and its personality. "
The increased resources that were then offered to him, on
Les Contes de la nuit
(2011) or
Dilili in Paris
(2018) for example, allowed him to pass the era of hand-cut paper to that of animation in digital.
“I did not suffer from this, quite the contrary.
Animating digital images is still less time consuming than cutting them out by hand, ”he joked with
20 Minutes
during the 50th anniversary of the Annecy Festival.
A before and an after "Kirikou"
More broadly in the world of animation, there was undoubtedly a before and an after
Kirikou
. The success of this film opened a path for the whole of a hitherto little recognized profession, outside the big studios. "In Annecy, I discovered that there were other crazy people like me who were doing free things, which they absolutely had to do, without hoping to one day be able to make a living from it," says Michel Ocelot in one of the interviews. shown in the exhibition.
But after
Kirikou
, independent productions then began to flourish in France, at an unprecedented level.
In 2003 alone, "five of the seven French cartoons were among the 50 most viewed films of the year," recalled
Le Monde
in December 2004. Now, there are an average of ten feature films produced each year and most of them, from
Persepolis
to the
Belleville Triplets
in the early 2000s or from
Josep
to
Calamity
last year, are success stories.
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Exposure
20 minutes video
Animation Film
Annecy festival
Cinema