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Stop-motion: Young Audience

Overview
Description
Films

The best of France's stop-motion animation to enjoy with the family.

Over the past fifteen years, France has produced an impressive collection of family films, taking care to represent diverse trends in stop-motion with numerous production studios and frontrunners in the industry. This programme is an attempt to capture the "French touch" in stop-motion for young audiences: What are the distinguishing features of these films? Is there a particular tone? Is there a dominate aesthetic?

Of the seven films selected, three were produced in Brittany by JPL Films, two others by Folimage in the Drôme region, a testimony to the remarkable investment these studios have made in the creation of quality animation geared to family audiences. Amongst the filmmakers, we find Pierre-Luc Granjon, who showed up in 2001 with A Little Adventure, and has since been considered a leader in stop-motion, having made at least nine shorts and TV films in just over ten years.

Overall, most of the films in the programme are marked by their poetic approach to reality, which leaves plenty of space for the imagination. The only works that don't follow this generalisation are Une partie de pétanque and Premier voyage, which stick to a more caricatured approach to everyday situations.