Inter-species love, happy poverty, sweets

The thing that's great about the French animated film Ernest & Célestine is the drawing, which has the same loose, light, Forties or Fifties pen & ink and watercolor sketch visual style as the 2012 children's book by Daniel Pennac. Never has there been a better antidote to the hard, plastic, puffy look of Hollywood or Pixar animations. The story, though sweet, about the fraught but ultimately happy every after friendship of a bear (Ernest, voiced by Lambert Wilson of The Princess of Montpensier and Of Gods and Men) and a little girl mouse (Célestine, voiced by Pauline Brunner), is a little odd, but only in a usual children's-book way. Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar, are the Belgian guys who made the stop-motion animation A Town Called Panic, and they're joined by and Benjamin Renner, who made the admired short A Mouse's Tail.. The scenario is by Daniel Pennac.

The scenario of the film is based on a series of over two dozen children's books featuring these characters by Belgian writer and illustrator Gabrielle Vincent, dating from 1981 to 2003, three years after her death.

Vincent has social concerns and the story is very obviously about relationships society deems "inappropriate," as well as about underdogs and the downtrodden. In this world, bears live above ground, rodents hidden below. Ernest the bear is a marginal bear, and a crude buffoon who's poor and hungry. In an opening sequence he struggles to play and sing in the village square to collect money or food and the police take his musical instruments and give him a ticket. It's while he's rummaging in garbage cans that he founds Célestine. She's is a little orphan mouse (at first we see her in a dormitory where the girls are told a bedtime story by the big jolly, awesome La Grise - Anne-Marie Loup) who's now in dental school, where trainees are required to bring in baby bear teeth in large numbers, to be used as replacements for redents. But she doesn't want to become a dentist just as Ernest doesn't want to become a notary. "Incisors" are also the key to culture, to civilization, which might be a reference to French society's self-satisfaction and sense of specialiness. There is a candy shop, "The King of Sugar," and Ernest raids it: he loves sweets. Célestine raids the wife's dentistry shop across the street, and gets a bagful of 50 teeth, which greatly impresses the head of the dental school. Ernest and Célestine get taken away and put on trial for robbing the two shops and are tried separately but both courtrooms catch fire, they save the judges, and are released as a reward and, the greatest award of all, allowed to live together.

Célestine, the reluctant dentist, is an offshoot of the folkloric little mouse who's a Gallic equivalent of the tooth fairy. Ernest is a new twist on the "big bad bear." Though Ernest threatens to eat Célestine when they first meet, she stops him, and he turns out to be a pussycat for all his dangerous strength and bluster. This combination of big and bumbling and little and innocent, not far from the world of A. A. Milne, is a sure delight to young children, but story elements have resonance for adults. Lambert Wilson reveals a comic range his you'd never suspect from his serious film roles. Don't forget though, that as a film, what Ernest & Célestine most has to offer is the loose yet sure and elegant lines of its drawings and the delicacy of its washes, which as the review in L'Humanité mentions, make one think of Raoul Dufy.

Mike D'Angelo rated this number six in his top ten films at Tornoto. He comments it's "endearingly nutty" like A Town Called Panic, and runs out of steam further along, the images continuing to delight right to the end. He is right also to point out that Ernest's song and dance routine is funnier if you know French. Lambert Wilson is very able in the singing parts.

Ernest & Célestine debuted at Cannes Directors Fortnight May 2012, opening theatrically in France 12 December after appearing in six or eight other festivals. Universal acclaim in France (Allociné ratings, both viewers and press, of 4.3) and the 2013 César for best animated film. Its US premiere apparently was the San Francisco International Film Festival, when it will show 28 April. Screened for this review in connection with the SFIFF.​​ First released Feb. 2014 (IFC Center, NYC).

_________________
©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.