The addition of more characters makes the animated vignettes extrapolated from the books more interesting. The cartoons were immediately popular, and so the pair expanded the world around him. But making Nicholas relatable seems to have been the key. It’s amusing to see them trial-and-erroring with alternate versions of Nicholas’ parents, including one drawing of a bourgeois family in which Dad’s a classics professor and Mom plays the harp, before landing on perhaps the most average solution possible. Sempé’s publisher wanted him to deliver a recurring weekly comic, and so he turned to his trusted pal Goscinny to write the stories. The trouble with the biographical focus is that it’s virtually devoid of drama or especially interesting detail. It helps that the Sempé and Goscinny sequences are set in a lovely bygone version of Paris - one that looks more like Ludwig Bemelmans’ Madeline books than Sempé’s own illustrations, though the goal was clearly to render the artists in much the same style as their creation. If you’re expecting a straightforward adaptation of one or more of his adventures (à la 2009’s “Little Rascals”-like live-action feature), then get ready for a lot of unnecessary baggage and extraneous backstory. If you want to know their story - how they met and where the ideas for Little Nicholas’ little universe came from - then “Little Nicholas” is for you. Goscinny first spent a few years in New York, where he worked alongside Mad magazine cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, but found the greatest success back in Paris as a writer.
Sempé joined the army at 17, knowing it would take him to the capital. (As a wink to his fans, a figurine of the Gallic warrior and big buddy Obelix sits on his desk in the film.) Both men moved to Paris aspiring to be illustrators. Six years older than Sempé (played by Laurent Lafitte), Goscinny (Alain Chabat) is perhaps better known for co-creating Asterix. Here is a movie, co-written by Goscinny’s daughter Anne, about a friendship between two artists that spawned one of France’s most successful kid-lit phenoms: a carefree middle-class kid (voiced by Simon Faliu) who adores planes, detests girls and makes a mess out of practically any situation. Every frame of co-directors Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre’s nostalgia-driven, Annecy-winning adaptation pays homage to their oeuvre - so much so that Little Nicholas isn’t even the movie’s main character. The thing is, you don’t even have to know Sempé and Goscinny’s work to recognize what a labor of love “Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be” happens to be. 'The Sea Beast' Review: In Which an Orphan Girl Tames the Ocean's Most Fearsome Monsters 'Smoking Causes Coughing' Review: Quentin Dupieux's Very Silly, Very Spacy Superhero Trifleīright Future Beckons for 2022 Annecy Residency Projects Now, the same studio has done right by Jean-Jacques Sempé and René Goscinny’s Petit Nicolas - or Little Nicholas to English speakers, who are almost certainly less familiar with the source material (essentially France’s answer to Dennis the Menace) and probably not as picky when it comes to how the character is treated. They’re the ones who translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” to the screen, erring on the side of overdoing the CG equivalent in that case. It’s a problem the folks at ON Entertainment take seriously. Or 2019’s disappointing “The Addams Family” reboot, which effectively turned Charles Addams’ macabre sketches into benign, generic-looking balloon animals. “The Adventures of Tintin” comes immediately to mind, since Spielberg and company made the bold choice of swapping artist Hergé’s appealing clean-line designs with appalling performance-capture zombies. Every time someone takes a comic book character the world adores and decides to make an animated movie, there’s a risk they won’t do justice to the original designs.