December 30th, 2022 
Jackson Murphy Little Nicholas: Happy As Can Be is a delightful new animated film about the characters from the iconic French children’s book series Le Petit Nicolas, and their creators, author Rene Goscinny and illustrator Jean-Jacques Sempe. Little Nicholas won Best Feature at this year’s Annecy Film Festival, and it recently had its awards-qualifying theatrical run in Los Angeles for the 2023 Best Animated Feature Oscar. Fans of Nicholas, and of unique, moving storytelling, are sure to enjoy it. Here’s my Animation Scoop Q&A with directors Benjamin Massoubre and Amandine Fredon. (This interview was conducted as an Email Q&A and was edited for length and clarity. All stills are courtesy of Buffalo 8.)
Jackson Murphy: How did you decide on the storytelling framework and structure of the movie?
Benjamin Massoubre: In the early days of development, the producers planned to combine archival footage of the creators with the animated segments, but the live-action material was not as good as we wanted it to be, so that’s when it was decided to have both sections of the movie be animated. We first had the script written by René Goscinny’s daughter Anne and Michel Fessler. Amandine and I wanted to flesh out the creators’ stories, so, with Anne writing, we added more biographical material to the movie. We felt that we had never seen the story of a writer and an illustrator working together on the screen, so we were excited to extend the portions of the movie about the creators’ lives in an animated format.
Charles Solomon’s Animation Year End Review 2022
Although he wrote them in 1859, Charles Dickens might have been thinking of animation in 2022 when he penned the celebrated lines, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us…”
As the COVID pandemic waned, the animation industry, like the entertainment industry in general, faced uncertain releasing strategies and box office earnings. Which films were released and how and when and what they earned was, to say the least, a puzzlement. After reporting revenue problems, Netflix cancelled some its most promising and prestigious animation projects. Other major studios saw their features go down in flames.
Looking over a year that see-sawed between Light and Darkness, I’m presenting the 10th annual awards for the year’s best and worst, named for the ultimate animation APM, Mikiko “Kuromi” Oguro.