Une Bombe par Hasard

Animated film director Jean-François Laguionie has remained a sailor of the mind since childhood and often his films navigate accompanied by a string quartet. Trained in shadow theatre and mime, he explores elective affinities with mischievous benevolence in his bitter-sweet screenplays. He is above a teller of tales who has chosen animation as his means of expression. He insists that animation will be cinema above all; he also asks the actors not only to dub a drawing, but to actually embody the character they are giving a voice to. One day Jacques Colombat took to Paul Grimault's workshop once when he was reworking La bergère et le ramoneur (The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep). He stayed for 10 years and developed his own cut out paper style.His first film, La demoiselle et le violoncelliste, was a masterpiece winning the Grand Prix at the Annecy Festival in 1965.He then made La traversée de l'atlantique à la rame and won a Palme d'Or in Cannes.In the features to come he he worked mainly on directing, using the singular art of the animatic. Jean-François Laguionie says that it is "a completely captivating and essntial moment. I feel like a kid, my screenplay is fairly clear in my mind, so are the characters, and I want to see the film as if it was made, as if I was sitting in a cinema seat and I was watching the film I want to make. I draw the whole film like that in a rudimentary way. Then I take a digital camera, shoot each of my drawings and edit them for the same duration as the film (1 ½ hours). I record the voices and make a mock-up of the film... it's badly drawn, it's badly photographed, but for me it's already the film."