One of the most eagerly anticipated features of this year’s Cannes Festival was Michel Hazanavicius’ animated adaptation, The Most Precious of Cargoes. The movie, which premiered today (Friday, May 24) at the festival’s Grand Théâtre Lumière, was the final title competing for the Palm d’Or. Based on Jean-Claude Grumberg’s book of the same name, the movie received a ten-minute ovation from the enthusiastic crowd.
Featuring the voices of Jean-Louis Trintignant, Grégory Gadebois, Dominique Blanc and Denis Podalydès, the animated Holocaust parable centers on a poor woodcutter and his wife who, rescue a baby girl thrown from one of the many trains that constantly pass through the forest. This baby, which is described as “the most precious of cargoes,” will transform the lives of the poor woodcutter’s wife and her husband, as well as those whose paths the child will cross – including the man who threw her from the train.
The film is produced by Hazanavicius, Florence Gastaud, Robert Guédiguian, Riad Sattouf and Patrick Sobelman. The Dardenne brothers, Jean-Pierre and Luc, are co-producers. Studiocanal will release in France in November. It’s the first animated feature to compete for the Palm d’Or since Waltz with Bashir in 2008. The film is also part of the competition at the Annecy Festival in June. No U.S. distributor has been announced to date.
Hazanavicius did all the character designs for the film himself. Earlier this week, the director told the Cannes Festival website, “The film is quite personal to me as I’ve been drawing since I was ten. Until then, drawing had always been a personal hobby that I never did much with. To be honest, I even found it incredibly hard to show my work for the film, it felt as if I had had a limb cut off, because it has always been such a private activity.”
He said reading the book felt like he was discovering a classic. “I wanted viewers to feel the same way when watching the film,” he says. “I drew the characters and atmospheres, but my style isn’t conventional, which makes it hard to animate. That meant we had to go back and forth with the animators without ever losing sight of the artistic vision I had for the characters. I wanted something that felt deep, melancholic almost, to create this sense of a film that had always existed and was now resurfacing.”
Hazanavicius, who won an Oscar for his 2011 feature The Artist, added, “Animation was a very empirical experience. It works in a very specific way, and I was forced to adapt to that. Initially, I found myself having goals that were really out of step with the very set ways of doing things, but I quickly identified who I could rely on to help, the crew who understood what the film sets out to achieve, and who were able to plug me into different roles.”
In his glowing review of the film, Variety critic Peter DeBruge writes, “Blending the heavy lines of early-20th-century woodcuts with the gentle pastels of watercolor painting, The Artist” director Michel Hazanavicius finds a poignant way to address not only the horrors of the Holocaust, but the kinds of kindness that combatted it, crafting an indelible parable destined to be watched and shared by generations to come…. The movie may be animated, but it’s no conventional cartoon. If anything, it looks like a graphic novel come to life, rendered in thick, dark strokes. The compositions are unexpectedly austere at times, sharing more in common with William Blake’s more tortured engravings than with the plaintive cat from DreamWorks’ Puss in Boots. But there’s heart to the human characters’ behavior.”
Here’s footage of the film’s reception in Cannes:
Here’s a clip from the movie:
Sources: Deadline, Variety, Cannes Festival
