The Look of 'Ernest & Celestine'

Plus: early CG animation, news.

A still from Ernest & Celestine (2012)

Welcome! This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the plan:

• 1. On the design and animation of Ernest & Celestine (2012).

• 2. Inside early computer animation.

• 3. Newsbits.

With that, let’s go!

1. Its own graphic universe

Animated movies from Europe take risks. Plenty aren’t as far outside the box as, say, Flow — the wordless gem that won an Oscar last year. But a lot of European animation has tried things this century, from The Secret of Kells to Robot Dreams.

For one, European governments support filmmakers. For another, these are small productions with room to maneuver. “The fact that we have low budgets, it’s possible to take risks,” said one director from the scene.¹

The speaker there was Benjamin Renner, discussing his Ernest & Celestine (2012). It was another of those risky movies. By now, it’s a modern classic — recommendable to anyone. The film is warm and funny from its first scene, and its Chaplin-and-Keaton-style humor really lands. And then there’s its look.

Ernest & Celestine’s places and characters, and the ways in which those characters move, are gorgeous and light. The whole film is like a moving watercolor sketch. It’s a style that feels spontaneous, even though it was carefully planned. Many, many projects have imitated it since, and the effect still hasn’t dulled.

Achieving the look mattered to Renner and the team. After all, this story about the friendship between a mouse and a bear came from a well-loved children’s book series, and those books have beautiful illustrations. “When we started working on the film, every member of the artistic team wanted to be very faithful to Gabrielle Vincent,” wrote Renner, referring to the series’ late author.²

It was a tricky balance. Producer Didier Brunner explained that it wasn’t enough to do “a mechanical conversion of Gabrielle Vincent’s work.” Instead, as Renner put it, they “had to avoid imitation in order to adapt the original style to the big screen in a fitting manner.”³

Stills from Ernest & Celestine

When Benjamin Renner got offered a position on Ernest & Celestine, it was around 2007. He was young — only 24. Renner had just graduated a few months earlier, and he hadn’t done much beyond his very good student film A Mouse’s Tale.⁴

That year, though, Didier Brunner was hunting for fresh talent. It was something he did. He’s in many ways the architect of modern French animation — and European animation generally. Kirikou, The Triplets of Belleville, Kells and more bear his name. Here, he was seeking someone to adapt Vincent’s books, to which he had a personal attachment. He’d read them to his daughter in the early ‘90s.⁵

“Looking around a bit at the directors I knew at the time, I didn’t see a personality suited to this kind of project,” Brunner recalled. So, he scouted French animation schools and got a lead from the unbeatable La Poudrière. He detected promise in A Mouse’s Tale.⁶

The two met, and Brunner pitched the idea. “[H]e gave me some of Gabrielle Vincent’s books, which I had never seen before,” said Renner, who immediately loved the art and stories:

I accepted because that was exactly what I wanted to do when I left the school — to illustrate using very clean lines, minimalist yet accurate. I wanted to convey emotions and sentiments in just a few lines, and movement through subtle animation.

Already, Renner was influenced by Studio Ghibli. (“I wasn’t allowed to watch Japanese anime before I was 18 years old. Spirited Away was quite a shock!” he said.) And Ernest & Celestine put him in mind of Isao Takahata’s My Neighbors the Yamadas — a film of low-key vignettes in a watercolor world, not unlike Vincent’s books. “I thought I was going to do a French Yamadas,” noted Renner.

It didn’t quite turn out that way, but Yamadas stayed a major reference. Renner went for the impressionistic type of digital animation that Ghibli had pioneered.

Soon after that first meeting, he animated a few tests in Flash. “The goal was to find the energy of Gabrielle Vincent’s drawings and interpret it into motion,” he wrote.⁷ Brunner later called them “simple, dynamic and magnificent.” The project was on its way.

One of Renner’s first animation tests for Ernest & Celestine

Another initial Renner test

One more early test by Renner

Ernest & Celestine began with a four-minute pilot, created by roughly 12 people over the course of a year.⁸ Renner was hesitant to direct, so that role went to Grégoire Sivan at first. It was Renner’s job to crack the style.

As he said:

Gabrielle Vincent always drew like sketchy, very spontaneously. … We learned that when she was drawing she would work on a single drawing and if it was not correct, she would not correct it but she would always take another piece of paper and she started redoing it, and redoing it, and redoing it until she was satisfied.

For the animation I wanted to have the spontaneous feeling, so the animation, as you can see, it’s not really clean, the lines are dirty, they are open, because it is more like you are sketching an animation rather than making something very precise.⁹

Working with him on the pilot was Marisa Musy, key to the look of the world. “Marisa played a huge part in our decision to do the sets in watercolor,” Renner said. Her test backgrounds captured something about Vincent’s own watercolors that, he felt, computers couldn’t.

Musy and her partner, who works under the name Zyk, did tremendous research for the film. They sketched studies of Vincent’s books and original art, met with people who’d known her, visited the city where she’d lived, used paper similar to hers. The two of them called Vincent’s style “very lively, very gestural,” with watercolors that are “soft, all in blends.” They took the same approach.¹⁰

Gabrielle Vincent illustrations from Bravo, Ernest and Celestine!

Concept art by Marisa Musy (Zaza) and Zyk, with characters drawn by Renner. Courtesy of the Ernest & Celestine art book.

Vincent’s art even impacted the staging. As Renner said, she used a “theatrical illustrative style” — in that her compositions are wide and stage-y, like a play. Likewise, Ernest & Celestine is full of old-fashioned film grammar, with wide, static shots and often extended takes. The team minimized close-ups and fancy camera angles, which suited Renner:

I don’t necessarily like these kinds of shots; I respond more to work like that of Chaplin, almost theatrical, where there is just the right framing that brings forward the actors’ performances.

Chaplin’s films became a reference, as did Keaton’s. Didier Brunner referred to the books themselves as “sweet, modest and Chaplinesque,” and it comes through in the film. There were other references, too: The King and the Mockingbird, Tokyo Godfathers, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Only Yesterday, My Neighbor Totoro.¹¹

It’s not easy to follow in the steps of movies like those, especially without disappearing into your influences and making a lesser copy. The same was true of Vincent’s work. Over time, Renner and the team came to understand the need to bring their individuality to the project. As he wrote:

How could we not betray her making this film? That was the question we always had in mind ... We didn’t think [of] the film as a film she could have made because we couldn’t imitate her; it would have been pointless.

When I was a kid, I used to read comic books or novels that I loved so much that I drew them to make new stories inspired by those universes. Ernest and Celestine is like that. In a way, it is a drawing we made inspired by her work that we want to share with her.¹²

Backgrounds by Marisa Musy and Zyk for the pilot, courtesy of their blog

Initial design work for the characters — uncredited, but likely Benjamin Renner’s. Courtesy of the Ernest & Celestine art book.

The need to break away from Vincent grew more obvious after the pilot, which hewed closer to her art. Some changes happened organically. As Renner kept drawing Celestine, for example, her proportions drifted based on what his hand naturally wanted to draw. Although he was trying for accuracy, he’d “appropriated the character without meaning to.”

When the feature started development, Renner finally accepted the director job, but he asked for a co-director as backup. He got two: Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar of A Town Called Panic. “[T]hanks to them, I let loose,” Renner said.

The film’s final style owes much to the team around the directors. Seï Riondet, the character designer, shaped Ernest & Celestine’s cast — scouring the books for ideas. “She worked maybe one complete year before we could have a complete lineup of all the characters,” Renner wrote. “She designed more than 170 characters and she [did] an amazing job.”¹³

Finalized designs for Ernest and Celestine. Courtesy of the Ernest & Celestine art book.

Marisa Musy and Zyk were all-important as well. They handled the color script, and Renner credited them as “the creators of the artistic design.” The pair oversaw the backgrounds and created a number of them personally.¹⁴ Each was done in two layers (ink and watercolor), then composited. As they wrote:

… all of the backgrounds were drawn traditionally. On a first sheet, we made a sketch in blue pencil. We didn’t get into details too much because the aesthetic of the film rested more on the dynamics of the line and the balance of the forms. On another sheet, we redrew that sketch in ink with the help of a light table. Then we went back to the first pencil drawing to apply watercolors. It was necessary to stretch the sheet over a wooden board [to combat warping]. … After the paper was dry, we erased the blue pencil to keep only the watercolor.

Meanwhile, the animators worked in Flash on the characters. One of the standouts was Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec, put in charge of “a large part of the sensitive scenes,” including the hug between Ernest and Celestine toward the end.¹⁵

Thanks to the animation’s looseness, color had to be done as creatively as the lines were. “You cannot just click in somewhere to fill a field with color,” said Patrick Imbert, who led the animation staff. “The paint had to be painted correctly, and we got animators for it.”

These passes resulted in flat, cel-style visuals. Another layer was added from there. To match the backgrounds, and channel Vincent’s art, the team needed an animated watercolor effect. That was one of the challenges with Ernest & Celestine, but custom software by Digital Graphics (in Belgium) solved it. Applied during the compositing stage, it made all the difference.¹⁶

Animation by Eléa Gobbé-Mévellec

Color animation by Joanna Lurie

Ernest & Celestine was never meant to be avant-garde. The script by Daniel Pennac has a classical feel, and Renner and his collaborators filmed it in a classical way. Even the artwork belongs to the world of children’s literature and Franco-Belgian comics — both popular fields.

But the film was still a risk. Not much animation had ever looked like this: even My Neighbors the Yamadas isn’t a one-to-one comparison. Renner was an unproven director, and Ernest & Celestine was made with unproven methods, and Vincent’s books were hardly a mega-franchise. Plus, while the budget of €10 million was small by American standards, money was still on the line. It was “a very substantial sum for a French animated film,” as Renner said.

These risks allowed Ernest & Celestine to become as interesting as it is — so interesting that Hollywood itself took notice, and has been inspired by it ever since.¹⁷ The film turned into an Oscar nominee and a symbol of what Europe’s co-production system can do.

And you can see that risk and its payoff at a glance, in the film’s wonderful artwork. It’s something Didier Brunner has always emphasized. Around 23 years ago, he put it this way:

... the uniqueness of European animation studios, and especially French ones, is the strong particularity of each film, which has its own graphic universe. This French and European uniqueness is a wealth that must absolutely be protected, because it is this which will differentiate [us] from “Hollywoodian” animated cinema.¹⁸

2. Worldwide animation news

2.1: Uncovering early CG animation

A design drawing for The Works, courtesy of Inside the Works

An important documentary came out this month — not in theaters or festivals, but on YouTube. Its title is Inside the Works, and it examines a place often overlooked in animation history: the NYIT Computer Graphics Lab.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was a greenhouse of early computer animation. Pixar’s co-founders Ed Catmull and Alvy Ray Smith spent years there (both were interviewed for the documentary). As we hear from the lab’s Michael Chou, a “who’s who of everybody in computer graphics went through those doors.”

And at the documentary’s center is The Works itself: an ambitious, unfinished attempt at the first all-CG feature.

Inside the Works was assembled by Jacob Pruitt, author of Drawing for Nothing. It began with a coincidence. In early 2024, he was researching The Works and contacted Amber Denker (formerly of the Computer Graphics Lab). Here’s Pruitt:

Amber told me about a college student who spoke to her a few years prior named Oliver Levine. Oliver was working on a paper about The Works, which later turned into a short documentary that he ended up shelving in early 2021. He and I got in touch, and he sent me the couple of interviews he’d done with Alvy Ray Smith and Ed Catmull. From there, he essentially handed me the torch.¹⁹

Pruitt did “off and on” work on the documentary from March 2024 until this month. A list of lab alumni guided him to his interview subjects — and to people with lab animation and related footage in their possession. “I had a box of 11 [U-Matic] tapes shipped to my house,” Pruitt notes. They were “warped, extremely moldy and hadn’t been played in decades but surprisingly had wonderful results.” These were just one source of the material in the doc.

“We have at least one piece of animation for every year between 1978–1992!” Pruitt writes.

Before he could compile it all into a film, Pruitt had to organize his interviews — in some ways, a pretty low-tech process. “The interviews were transcribed automatically and I made notes about topics that were talked about when and where,” he explains. “I printed out those notes (with time stamps), cut them into strips and sat down in front of a table and sorted for hours to tell one big story.”

Tying Inside the Works together are its animated host segments. Two lo-fi characters from the lab’s film 3DV (1983) were recreated with the help of surviving references, like wireframe printouts. Pruitt was the writer and director here; most of the visual side came from artists under the pseudonyms Ubern, Dooble and Maximized Animation. “The tape filter we used for those animated sequences was made from scratch in Blender by my friend Ike Henderson,” Pruitt writes.

They were only part of the crew involved, joined by sound designer Tamar and the voice actors. Pruitt adds:

I’m eternally grateful to the team for volunteering on this project because we were never sure if we’d even make money from it. So far, we still haven’t due to copyright issues. In the end it was a passion project that, regardless of the result, we wanted to see finished.

Along the way, they broke real ground. There’s wild footage and information in Inside the Works — this is a rare peek into the strange, little-known world of computer animation before Pixar. And Pruitt isn’t done digging. “There was one very large discovery made at NYIT, but I’m not sure if I’m allowed to talk about that yet,” he writes. “The master to The Works was also recently recovered, so finds are going to keep emerging!”

You can find Inside the Works below:

2.2: Newsbits

• We lost Tom Kane (64), the voice of Professor Utonium and countless others.

• In Ukraine, the Dovzhenko Center reports that it’s secured the rights to almost 400 of the country’s animated films. It plans to upload new scans on an official channel.

• Cartoon Brew has a great interview with the Japanese cinematographer Atsushi Okui about his work with Ghibli on Whisper of the Heart and Arrietty.

• The Japanese film Nezumikozo Jirokichi (2023), directed by Rintaro, hit YouTube with English subtitles.

• There’s an intriguing three-minute clip available for Light Pillar, a new Chinese feature. An American distributor recently picked up the film and is planning a theatrical release.

• In the Dominican Republic, director Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat (Olivia & the Clouds) is working on his next feature, Where the Bees Sleep, in collaboration with Nika Zhukova. He recently shared materials from the project.

• The Mexican studio Cinema Fantasma, of Frankelda fame, released a demo reel that includes footage of its yet-to-be-completed Ballad of the Phoenix.

• In Russia, Sergey Kapkov has another animation history book on the way.

• In America, Deaf Crocodile announced a new batch of animated film releases for this year, including the fourth volume of its Treasures of Soviet Animation series. This one is dedicated to The Adventures of Mowgli.

• Last of all: we looked at the move away from “cartoons” in Japanese animation.

Until next time!

1. See the Los Angeles Times.

2. From Renner’s blog for Ernest & Celestine.

3. From the press kit and the Ernest & Celestine art book, Ernest et Célestine et Gabrielle et Benjamin et Didier et Daniel et les autres. Both used a lot.

4. See Le Nouvel Obs, used a few times.

5. From “The Making of Ernest & Celestine,” also used a few times.

6. See Renner’s interview with Anime Land, a key source.

7. From Renner’s blog.

8. See the South China Morning Post and the foregoing sources.

9. From this interview with Renner.

10. See this document (very important today) and the Zazyk blog.

11. See this interview with Renner.

12. From Renner’s blog.

13. Also from Renner’s blog.

14. See Renner’s blog posts here and here.

15. See “Animating Ernest & Celestine,” a Creators Project video, and Gobbé-Mévellec’s 2011 demo reel.

16. From Renner’s blog.

17. Ernest & Celestine was an acknowledged influence on The Bad Guys, to name just one — and it’s very hard to believe that Zootopia wasn’t taking notes.

18. See this archived interview with Brunner.

19. Pruitt’s replies have been edited for length and clarity. As a note, we were very tangentially involved in this project: we supplied a few of the photos used.