A Certain Tendency in French Comic Book Adaptations
Why do French comic books rarely translate well on screen in live action?
To prepare for the upcoming release of the new Netflix series based on the Astérix comic books (available April 30), I’m rewatching the films starring the famous Gaul and his best friend Obélix, specifically the five live-action ones and the three most recent animated ones (the last two having a visual identity that is similar to the show).
In an amusing twist of fate, this month also marked the theatrical release (in French-speaking markets) of an unsuccessful adaptation of Natacha, a popular comic book that’s been in print since 1971 (the most recent album was published shortly before the film’s debut), and the first edition of Kidult Mania, a convention organized by Clap.ch (one of my outlets in Switzerland), where the guest of honor was one Jean-Pierre Talbot, a Belgian actor known for having played Tintin in two live-action films.
All this had me thinking: why do French producers insist on trying to adapt these stories for the screen in a medium other than animation? It’s a veritable obsession, one I often cite as the main piece of evidence disproving the lazy cliché of France’s cinematic output being nothing but artsy dramas where people talk, drink, smoke and sometimes have sex. When I was living in Lausanne, in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, Franco-Belgian comic book adaptations were generally greeted with a heavy sigh at the end of the press screening. And there were a lot of them.
Funnily enough, Natacha is, for my money, on the more accomplished end of the spectrum: none of the set pieces are particularly creative, but the gag rate is consistent and the actors have great timing. But I’m not surprised audiences have largely ignored it, after years of being subjected to live-action takes on comics that do not have their place in the live-action filmmaking realm.
That’s because, in the family-oriented domain especially, the Franco-Belgian style is one predicated on humor, exaggeration, caricature. The characters rarely look like regular human beings and their worlds are frequently equally bizarre, which is why attempting to replicate that aesthetic in live-action is often a foolhardy endeavor, because unless one commits to the madness (as Alain Chabat admirably did with his Astérix film in 2002), the result tends to be weird to look at (I still cringe when I think back to the Spirou and Fantasio movie from a few years ago).
Of course, this doesn’t automatically mean the more adult-oriented comics fare much better: Jan Kounen’s take on Blueberry was so weird the estate of co-creator Jean-Michel Charlier tried to have his name taken off the movie, and Luc Besson’s Valerian, while having its moments, quickly got lost up its own backside, like a less fun version of the 2011 Green Lantern movie (which wasn’t much fun to begin with).
Steven Spielberg understood this when he eventually fulfilled his decades-long ambition of making a Tintin film, opting for performance capture to fully convey the magic of Hergé’s visuals, and it’s also why recent Astérix productions have generally done better in animated form, leading to the new show which marks Chabat’s return to the world of Roman-occupied Gaul in the year 50 B.C.
Not that it’s going to stop others from trying to crack the live-action formula for the loveable warrior, with a sixth – undoubtedly very expensive - movie in the works even though the fifth failed to really impress fans. To paraphrase Obélix, these producers are crazy…