Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be

A desk, paper and ink. Sempé draws, Goscinny writes, and a boy appears between them. They give him a name: Nicolas. The boy looks up at them from the page and talks. Then he goes back to his own world; school, friends, playground fights, holidays. The two men tell their own childhoods. Sempé's home was hard. Goscinny went to Argentina during the war years and lost his father early. Nicolas listens and asks: what are we waiting for to be happy. Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre direct. It is a French and Luxembourg co-production and runs an hour and twenty two minutes. The source is the Little Nicolas books by René Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé. The film won the Cristal for a feature at the 2022 Annecy International Animation Festival and was given a special screening at Cannes the same year. The animation stays with Sempé's watercolour line; the backgrounds look painted and the drawing is deliberately unsteady. Its form is double; the lives of the creators and the life of the character they draw run into each other. The narrative also tells of Goscinny's death, and in that section the film stops being a children's film. Its limit is audience; too biographical for children, too fragmentary for adults. Who it is for: viewers who like Sempé's line, French animation and biographies of makers. Who it is not for: it is episodic, has no plot, and the ending is sad.