Round Da Way

Tony and Jose, two small-time crooks hanging around the suburbs, pull jobs together. When Jose meets a rich girl and wants to go straight, the balance breaks. At the same time things go wrong in the neighbourhood and the pair get into trouble far above their size. Emmanuel Klotz and Albert Pereira-Lazaro directed, from the long-running French television series Les Lascars. The animation technique is interesting: the characters are flat and exaggerated in two dimensions while the backgrounds are textured three-dimensional spaces. The two layers deliberately fail to match, creating tension between the weight of the estate and the lightness of the characters. Vincent Cassel and Diane Kruger provide voices. The humour rests entirely on slang and suburban speech, which made distribution outside France difficult. Its budget was high for French animation and it did not meet expectations at the box office. Who it is for: viewers who like adult animation and French suburban comedy. Who it is not for: anyone watching dubbed; the joke is in the language and the language does not travel.