In Le Petit Nicolas, all the wounds of its authors, Sempé and Goscinny

A beaten kid, taken to Paris with his sketches under his arm, and a globetrotter exiled to escape the Holocaust: for Rene Goscinny as for Jean-Jacques Sempé, who died on Thursday, create The little Nicolas was a way to heal the wounds of a dented childhood.

Chance of the calendar, the creative process at the origin of the most famous of the little schoolchildren, essential hero of children’s literature, and now doubly orphan, after the death Thursday of Sempé, is at the heart of an animated film which must be released in theaters October 12. Le Petit Nicolas, what are we waiting for to be happy?for which directors Amandine Fredon and Benjamin Massoubre met Sempé before his death, won the Cristal d’Or at the Annecy Animation Film Festival.

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Far from the idealized France of the 1950s traced in their joint works, it shows how the two men drew inspiration from their intimate wounds to create the mischievous little boy, best friend for generations of readers and sold 15 million copies. . When he met Sempé in the Paris of the 1950s, Goscinny was a young man who had already rolled over his head: he left very young for Argentina with his parents to flee the Holocaust, he then wandered between the United States where he dreams to work with Walt Disney, and notably met Morris, the creator of Lucky Luke, and France.

Sempé is a kid from a popular family in Bordeaux, beaten by his stepfather and moved to Paris to try his luck. The love of drawing is therefore not the only thing that connects the two young men.

The creation of Petit Nicolas, “it’s a story of resilience, of two guys who had their childhood stolen, one by the Shoah and the other by an abusive stepfather, and who will create this dream childhood. du Petit Nicolas”, explained to AFP Benjamin Massoubre, one of the co-directors, during the Annecy Festival. The film shows these two complicit personalities, pencil in hand, sometimes at home, sometimes on the terrace of a café: “Goscinny, far from his image of a Frenchman in slippers, is a globetrotter”, Sempé in love with jazz and music.

The first sketches, the choice of the first name, almost randomly, thanks to an advertisement for the wine merchant Nicolas… The film traces the genesis of what will become one of the most read works of French heritage. The directors, who worked hand in hand with René Goscinny’s daughter, Anne, were able to use the artists’ archives. And faithfully recreating the elegant line of Jean-Jacques Sempé, which had to be adapted to the screen, a challenge.

“To be faithful to his universe, we started from his drawings and we made files: restaurants, bars, parks, trees”, to build a database from which the designers drew, explains Amandine Fredon, the other director. “It’s very hard to do Sempé”, acknowledges the filmmaker. But the bet is successful: the film, now in the form of a farewell, will allow spectators to sit down as if they were there at the table where Jean-Jacques Sempé, pencil in hand, created this little boy who spoke so much to the unhappy child he had been.