by Tessa Swehla, Associate Editor

Animation is truly one of my first and enduring movie loves, but I have to admit to a rather narrow knowledge of the medium. This year, I was able to expand my awareness through Animation First, one of the biggest film festivals dedicated to animation in the US and certainly the biggest dedicated to French language animation filmmaking, put on by L’Alliance New York, an NYC-based non-profit dedicated to promoting French language and French language programming from all over the globe. French film in general, especially French science fiction, is a tradition of film I want to learn more about, and this film festival, now having just completed its eighth year, was a great way to get started. I can’t wait to attend in 2026!

Here are some of the best films I was able to catch at this year’s festival.

Yuku and the Himalayan Flower (Yuku et la fleur de l’Himalaya)
Directed by Arnaud Demuynck and Rémi Durin
Runtime: 1 hour and 2 minutes
NY Premiere

Yuku and the Himalayan Flower is an impressive feature film debut from long-time collaborators Arnaud Demuynck and Rémi Durin. The film introduces us to musical prodigy mouse Yuku, who journeys to find a famed illuminated flower for her ill grandmother. Despite its younger audience (recommended age is 3+), the film doesn’t shy away from difficult topics. Yuku knows that her grandmother will soon follow the blind mole deep underground (the in-film folklore for death), and her quest is not to heal her grandmother but to provide her with a light to take with her to the underworld so she will not be scared of the dark (look, if I talk about it too much, I’ll start crying again). I could see parents using this film as a way of discussing old age, ill health, and death with their children because it is so gentle and hopeful in its treatment of these themes.

The animation combines 3D and 2D perspectives and different art styles seamlessly to create a fantastic and colorful world for Yuku’s hero’s journey, filled with texture, song, and light. I was constantly surprised by the visual vitality of the storytelling, effortlessly mixing stained glass style animation in a flashback sequence with storybook watercolors in another. A pleasingly round gray mouse carrying a ukulele, Yuku charms a number of initially forbidding woodland creatures with her music, tailoring each song to them and their personal anxieties or problems. It’s a formulaic folklore structure, to be sure, but the episodic nature of Yuku’s journey and the diversity of her new allies allows the film to be appealing for adult audiences while still providing the repetitive structure and security for children.

The Twelve Tasks of Astérix (Les Douze travaux d’Astérix)
Directed by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo
Runtime: 1 hour and 20 minutes
US Premiere of Restoration

I genuinely had no idea how popular the Astérix franchise is in France before watching this film, but, apparently, the diminutive Gaul warrior and his oafish sidekick Obelix have been a French pop culture fixture since their first comic book appearance in 1961. The first French satellite, launched in 1965, was named Astérix-1! The latest Astérix film was released in 2023! After watching this film, the third in the franchise, I can see why.

Released in 1976, The Twelve Tasks of Astérix re-introduces the characters as the inhabitants of a small unnamed Gaul village in 50 BCE. This village is the lone holdout against the invasion of the Roman army–led by a ruthless Julius Caesar–due to a magic potion brewed by their local druid that gives them all superhuman strength. The Roman soldiers, exhausted by numerous unsuccessful attempts to conquer the village, claim that the inhabitants must be gods and thus not subject to Roman rule. Caesar, furious that this rumor is starting to take hold in Rome, challenges the village to complete twelve tasks, inspired by The Twelve Labors of Hercules (“Hercules?” the Gaulish chieftain asks, “the grocer?”). If they complete all the tasks successfully, then Caesar will surrender Rome to them. If they fail even one task, then the village must submit to Roman rule. The village elders assign completion of the tasks to our heroes Astérix and Obelix, who embark on a road trip of truly wacky hijinks.

The Twelve Tasks reminded me of The Sword in the Stone (dir. Wolfgang Reitherman, Clyde Geronimi, David Hand, 1963), complete with sly British narrator and cheeky meta elements that don’t quite break the fourth wall (although there is a moment in the introduction when the narrator asks the audience for a show of hands if they have heard of Astérix, and the answer comes in the form of black silhouettes of hands raised in front of the animation as if we are in the back of the theater). The story is a fairly simple task-oriented quest storyline where each task is solved either by Astérix’s cleverness or by Obelix’s brute strength (and legendary appetite). We’ve seen this kind of storytelling since The Odyssey or even older myths about the adventures of Theseus or Jason. The Twelve Tasks revels in this structure while also poking fun at it: one of the “impossible” tasks is obtaining just one form from an office run by bureaucrats, while another is to solve a riddle posed by a wise hermit at the peak of a mountain…only for the riddle to actually be an add for laundry detergent. One of the first films to use the xerography animation process instead of traditional hand inking, the animation appears deceptively simple, but there are little moments that push the boundaries of what was possible at the time. Fair warning: there are some racist stereotypical images of Indigenous and Middle Eastern peoples, but these are, thankfully, fairly brief.

Harmony (Harmonie)
Directed by Bertrand Dezoteux
Runtime: 1 hour and 15 minutes
NY Premiere

Another debut feature-length film, Harmony is the creation of Bertrand Dezoteux, an experimental animator with a focus on lo-fi, computer generated animation. The purposely imperfect animation style emphasizes the thematic explorations of the film, rejecting the commercialization of mainstream animation. The film is named for the planet Harmony, the destination of Earthborn explorer Jesus Pérez (yes, he also looks like that Jesus). Jesus remarks that the planet is named Harmony for various properties, most important of which is the ability of the flora and fauna to interbreed across species boundaries. These inhabitants also sing-speak in harmonies, although the only words they seem to be able to say are yes and no, which causes no end of misunderstandings and miscommunications. Jesus wanders the planet–evoking the 40 days and 40 nights in the desert of the other Jesus and giving the entire film a mythological air.

While the animation’s roughness can be distracting at times for those used to more glossy fare, it allows Dezoteux to create some truly Cronenburgian creatures. Hybridity, fluidity, and instability are the keys to these images, which often evoke Vandermeer’s evolutionary nightmare of Annihilation (dir. Alex Garland, 2018) or George Macdonald’s monstrous hybrids in The Princess and Curdie (1883). The juxtaposition of animal, human, and plant biologies pose a posthuman future in which the imagined possibilities are endless. Jesus descends from the heavens bearing gifts from Earth for the denizens of Harmony, but as he journeys and learns, he too begins to mutate, affected by the planet just as the planet is affected by him. Plus, he has some great lines, like asking what I can only describe as a human/ostrich/plant hybrid if they are an existentialist or commenting on a giant Argus-like creature with conjunctivitis, “what an infected panopticon.” This film is definitely a challenging one to watch if you are used to traditional narratives, but in a way that I can’t stop thinking about.

The Machine-Men (Les Hommes Machines)
Directed by René Laloux
Runtime: 7 minutes
US Premiere

I am a newcomer to the work of René Laloux, having only watched his most well-known work The Fantastic Planet (1973) for the first time only recently, but between that film and this short–originally conceived as a proof of concept for the 1987 feature Gandahar–I’m already an ardent fan. Animation First’s screening of The Machine-Men was the US premiere of the restoration, and it is seven minutes of pure blissful vibes. Like Harmony, this film presents us with a world of hybrid fantasy creatures, but unlike the planet in Dezoteux’s film, this world is presented as a place where technology and nature merge into new beautiful forms. Usually, when this kind of merging occurs in science fiction, we are presented with a cyberpunk dystopia, but Laloux instead imagines a techno-organic Eden, full of innocence and playful imagination. There is no real plot: this film instead relies on the atmospheric score of Brian Eno and the gorgeous psychedelic colors and shapes of the visuals. Truly a short masterpiece of animation prowess, this film will be the subject of many rewatches by myself, and I am excited to also check out the feature Gandahar when I can get my hands on the restoration.

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