Michel Ocelot exhibits at the Annecy Festival – 20 minutes
The 60th Annecy festival,
Michel Ocelot would not have missed it for the world, especially as a
exposure 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, fireworks 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 Adventures of Prince Ahmed by the German pioneer Lotte Reiniger (1929), on a very assertive style for the one who, paradoxically, confides in the exhibition: “my ideal would be not to have a style”.
He managed a blockbuster while remaining himself
We also see his “first official job” for television, duck Gideon adapted from Benjamin Rabier, at the beginning of the 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 other than drawing, animating images, and he is someone who, without looking for it, has succeeded in making a blockbuster all by remaining himself, explains to 20 minutes the former artistic director of the Serge Bromberg festival, who selected him in 1999. Michel managed to meet the public without ever compromising on his style or his stories. This is what makes its strength and its personality. “
The increased resources that were then offered to it, on Tales of the night (2011) or Dilili in Paris (2018) for example, allowed him to move from the era of hand-cut papers to that of digital animation. “I did not suffer from this, quite the contrary. Animating images digitally 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 The world in December 2004. Now, on average, there are
ten feature films produced annually and most of Persepolis to the Belleville triplets, in the early 2000s or Josep at Calamity, last year, are success stories.