Paris studio Je Suis Bien Content (JSBC) has announced a new chapter for the popular French comic Silex & The City, having begun production on a new live-action and animated hybrid feature about the family that’s on a mission to shake-up the Stone Age. Created by Jul (Julien Berjeaut), the comic’s nine albums have sold more than a million copies, and inspired an animated series which aired 180 episodes on Arte (France), known internationally as The Darwinners.
The film is the biggest screen adventure yet for the Dotcom family — father Blog, a hunting teacher; mother Spam, a prehistory-geography teacher; daughter Web, a teenager in an emancipation crisis; and son Url, a militant anti-Darwinist. Trapped in a prehistoric operetta, condemned never to evolve, father-daughter conflict will disrupt the family’s Stone Age routine: After a tragicomic return trip to the future, they accidentally bring back the equivalent of an Ikea Allen key — finally triggering Evolution, for better and, especially, for worse!
“A real leap in the chain of evolution, the passage of Silex & The City from the three-minute format to the long format is a small revolution,” notes creator Jul. “From a ‘one sentence-one joke’ type of writing, we leap into a suspenseful cinematic adventure: In the movie, the Dotcom family takes on a more sympathetic dimension, the references to the classics of genre cinema can resonate more, and the political criticism of our crazy civilization can really shine in this long-form story.”
Written and co-directed by Jul and Jean-Paul Guigue (Best Bugs Forever, Blaise) and produced by Je Suis Bien Content and co-founder/producer Franck Ekinci, the Silex & The City film will combine 2D animation and live action. A number of well-known Francophone actors and personalities will participate in the project, including Bruno Solo, Julie Gayet, Léa Drucker, journalist Stéphane Bern, literary critic Frédéric Beigbeder, Belgian author Amélie Nothomb and former President of France François Hollande.
The voice cast will also feature Frédéric Pierrot, Guillaume Gallienne, Michel Vuillermoz, Clément Sibony, Denis Ménochet, Noémie de Lattre, Sophia Aram, Lison Daniel, Alex Vizorek, Agnès Hurstel, Léa Salamé, Patrick Mille, Émilie Aubry, Ophélia Kolb, Raphaël Quenard, Océan, Augustin Trapenard and Félix Moati.
Je Suis Bien Content is co-producing the feature with Arte Cinéma and Leftfield (Belgium) in association with BE-TV (Belgium), SG Images, the CNC and Wallimages. Theatrical distribution will be handled by Haut & Court in France and internationally by Urban. The animation is being produced at JSBC’s Paris studio and Wahoo! studio in Liège, while live-action footage will be shot in mid-December around Brussels.
Production on Silex & The City is expected to wrap next spring, for a theatrical release window in the last trimester of 2024.
