---
name: "Stéphane Aubier"
canonical: "https://film.one/person/stephane-aubier"
roles: ["Director"]
born: "8 October 1964"
reviewed_on_fi1m: 1
updated: "2026-09-17T06:59:26.300115+00:00"
licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL."
---

# Stéphane Aubier

Director. Born 8 October 1964 in Verviers, Belgium.

## Details

- **Work:** Director
- **Born:** 8 October 1964, Verviers, Belgium
- **Also known as:** Stéphane, Aubier, ستيفان, أوبير, ستيفان أوبير, ستيفاني أوبيار, ستيفاني, أوبيار
- **Elsewhere:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3501563, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0041334/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/126597

## Streaming the US now

- **Tubi:** [*Ernest & Celestine*](https://film.one/film/ernest-and-celestine.md) (84)

For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country.

## Fi1m on Stéphane Aubier

> Stéphane Aubier, nearly always with Vincent Patar, makes comedies out of plastic farm toys and, once, out of watercolour that will not stay inside its lines. The pictures look thrown together; the timing never is. We rate him, and we wish he made features more often.

A plastic cowboy, a plastic Indian and a plastic horse live in a village where something has just gone badly wrong, and nobody on screen finds this odd. That is the world Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar have been building since the *Pic Pic André Shoow* shorts of 1988: cheap toy figures, moved a fraction at a time, in a countryside that takes its own catastrophes with total seriousness. The figures cannot change expression, so every joke has to be in the movement and the cut, and Aubier's instinct for when to hold a shot and when to bolt is what makes the crudeness read as comedy rather than poverty.

The two met at art school in Liège in the early 1980s and have not really worked apart since. The village went to television as *Panique au village*, twenty episodes across 2002 and 2003, and then to feature length as *A Town Called Panic* (2009), with Vincent Tavier producing and co-writing. Three years later came the film we have reviewed, *Ernest & Celestine* (2012), co-directed with Patar and Benjamin Renner from Daniel Pennac's screenplay and Gabrielle Vincent's books: a mouse, a bear, hand-drawn watercolour, not a toy in sight. Since then he has mostly gone home, with *La Bûche de Noël* (2013), *La rentrée des classes* (2016) and *La foire agricole* (2019).

*Ernest & Celestine* is the one to start with. The outlines wobble, the colour bleeds past them, and the backgrounds are left unfinished, so a street trails off into white paper as though the painter had gone for lunch. We spent the first five minutes worrying about the paper and the rest of the film not noticing it was there, and by the end we were fonder of a mouse and a bear than we had planned to be. The reason is that the drawing is generous: nothing is polished to a shine, so the film never looks as if it is selling us anything. Aubier's own account is plainer still: "We worked towards something that would above all make Vincent, Benjamin and myself laugh, in keeping with the spirit of the original books and with respect to the screenwriter, but without really asking ourselves who the film was aimed at."

The complaint against the toy films is that they look rough, and they do. We would go a little further. A plastic figure can panic and it can run, and there is not much else it can do, which is why the village work stays small and why the specials, however funny, feel like more of the same. *Ernest & Celestine* showed what Aubier's timing can do once it is given faces that move and a story with a second gear. He has made two features and a great many shorts. The village has plainly not run out of disasters; we would still like to see him leave it again.

## Biography

Stéphane Aubier is a Belgian animator, writer and director. He was born on 8 October 1964 in Verviers, Belgium. He trained at the École supérieure des arts Saint-Luc in Liège and the École Supérieure des Arts Visuels de la Cambre in Brussels, where he met Vincent Patar; the pair have collaborated throughout their careers under the name Pic Pic André.

Aubier and Patar created the cult stop-motion television series *Panique au village* (2002–2009) and its 2009 feature film *A Town Called Panic*. In 2012 Aubier co-directed the animated feature *Ernest & Celestine* with Patar and Benjamin Renner; the film received the César Award for Best Animated Film in 2013. He has continued to direct shorts and series featuring characters from their shared universe.

*Sources: imdb.com, fr.wikipedia.org, en.wikipedia.org, cineuropa.org.*

## On Fi1m (1)

- *Ernest & Celestine* (2012), Fi1m 84, Director — [page](https://film.one/film/ernest-and-celestine.md)

## Also known for

- *A Town Called Panic* (2009), Writer, Director

---
© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/stephane-aubier