Category: Language: French

The Little Prince. Dir. Mark Osborne. Paramount Pictures. 2015

“One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye.” In The Little Prince the depiction of foxes defies conventional animality as they generally symbolise perfidy. But The Fox here is characterised as holding pragmatic intellectual power. He is a teacher but does not hold any other forms of power,…

23rd January 2023
The Little Prince. Dir. Mark Osborne. Paramount Pictures. 2015

The Little Prince uses the animated medium of a children’s film to reconfigure the representation of the snake. A ‘common trope’ also applied here, is to present snakes as a certain bringer of death. The image of a reptile being posed as ‘cold-hearted aggressor’ is familiar as it goes back to Adam and Eve –…

6th January 2022
Raw. Dir. Julia Ducournau. Focus World. 2017.

When Julia Ducournau’s debut feature film Raw (2017) was shown at Toronto’s Film Festival, paramedics were called to the scene after cinema-goers fainted during the screening. Raw tells the story of highly gifted 16-year-old vegetarian, Justine (Garance Marillier) and her journey into a merciless and dangerously seductive world during her first week of veterinary school. During a gruesome hazing ritual,…

28th January 2021
Ernest and Celestine. Dir. Benjamin Renner. StudioCanal. 2012

Ernest and Celestine[2] (2012) is a French animated film that presents the unorthodox relationship between a bear and a mouse. Introduced as a struggling musician, Ernest is starving and on the hunt for food; Celestine is on the hunt for teeth when they form an unlikely pairing to help one another. Due to societal constraints and animal…

2nd June 2020
Ernest and Celestine. Dir. Benjamin Renner. StudioCanal. 2012.

The animated film Ernest and Celestine[1] (2012) uses animals to offer a socio-political examination of French society. A predator-prey construct is conveyed through the division of social classes in the species contrast between a mouse- Celestine, and a bear- Ernest. By depicting stereotypes of animality and inverting the norms to show an unorthodox friendship, Renner exposes human class limitations.…

28th May 2020
Mon Oncle . Dir. Jacques Tati. Gaumont (France), Continental Distributing (USA). 1958.

The release of Mon Oncle (Gaumont, France) in 1958 saw the return of Monsieur Hulot to cinema screens, following the successful Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot five years previously. The first of Tati’s films to be released in colour, the film follows the character of Hulot (Jacques Tati), an awkward but incredibly endearing man, and…

29th January 2019
Au Hasard Balthazar. Dir. Robert Bresson. Cinema Ventures. 1966.

Au Hasard Balthazar (dir. Robert Bresson, 1966) juxtaposes the human treatment of animals with animal camaraderie between different species, emphasising a human/animal divide and how we think of animals as one homogeneous group that we are not apart of, despite biological taxonomy saying otherwise.

16th January 2017
Weekend. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Athos Films. 1967.

Weekend (1967), dir. Jean-Luc Godard (watch the full film with English subtitles here) Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend follows the distinctly middle-class experience of Roland and Corinne as they take a trip to Corinne’s family home in the country to secure her inheritance from her father, which, as we will find out, they will acquire by any means necessary.…

15th January 2017
Polar Bears: A Summer Odyssey. Dir. Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson. Universal Pictures. 2012.

18th December 2014
Mon Oncle Antoine. Dir. Claude Jutra. National Film Board of Canada, Janus Films. 1971.

18th December 2014