“I think animated movies are dead,” declares Sébastien Laudenbach.
It’s quite the statement from the celebrated filmmaker and illustrator, whose 2023 movie Chicken for Linda! won him a César Award. He’s catching up with The Hollywood Reporter before the premiere of his latest feature, Viva Carmen — inspired by Georges Bizet’s beloved opera — hypnotizes the Croisette with its sun-dappled, spirited animation and imaginative storytelling.
To clarify his point, the festival regular must cite his mother tongue. “In French, it’s the same word to say [you are] finishing something and killing something. It’s very strong,” Laudenbach says. “I’m moved by unfinished drawings, by unfinished sketches. When something is totally finished, it can be beautiful, but it can be dead, as well.” So, in the case of Viva Carmen, Laudenbach’s objective was clear: “To not finish the movie.”
You wouldn’t know the film is, according to its director, incomplete. The product of that poetically described creative approach is simply stunning: The Seville-set movie adapts Bizet’s story by fleshing out the lives of the children’s chorus, primarily focusing on the leader of the pack, Belén, and her fellow orphan, Salvador. In 1845, Salvador — along with the rest of the town — is set abuzz by a captivating gypsy woman. When a gifted knife grinder glimpses into the future of his sharpened blades and foretells a tragic fate for Carmen at the hands of a soldier, José, Salvador musters a band of misfit street kids to challenge those unyielding threads of destiny.
For Laudenbach, Viva Carmen was always about appealing to as wide an audience as possible. “I know we can’t change the world with a movie, but maybe speaking to kids, a young audience — [the opera] Carmen is only an adult story — […] it’s a way to make this story more simple and more accessible.” He’s well aware that the tale is not the easiest sell for kids, considering Carmen’s widely known fate, but this tussle with failure is exactly the message he hopes to send to young audiences — the ones lucky enough to catch it on the Croisette, but also theatergoers in December, when the film gets its wide release.
Normally, kids have a mission, and they succeed,” he says. “Here, it’s not the case. They fail, but after the failure, [they can think]: ‘What can we do? What’s next? Maybe we can change the world?’ ”
Laudenbach can’t talk about the movie without gushing over the work of his team, including producer Pierre-Henri Léon, who first came up with the idea to adapt the opera, graphic designer Cyril Pedrosa, head of character design Éléa Gobbé-Mévellec and production designer Élodie Rémy. They created, he says, an unfinished piece of cinema, teeming with mystery. “Having a mystery when you are kid, but also when you are an adult, it’s beautiful,” he says.
He confesses that the prospect of premiering Viva Carmen in Cannes is a little daunting. But Laudenbach is ready to send Carmen and the kids out into the world, far from the elite circles of opera: “I work on this movie every day, but now it’s not mine anymore. So I look at him — I look at it, but it’s like a person for me — and I want to tell him to grow, to meet people. Cannes is a good first step.”
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