Vincent Patar favours plastic figures, unruly animals and drawings that leave the paper showing. We rate his animation most highly when its kindness gets as much attention as its mischief, as in Ernest & Celestine.
Fi1m perspective
In Ernest & Celestine (2012), a street of bear shops dwindles into bare paper at the side of the picture. The outlines wobble and the watercolour strays beyond them, without anyone tidying up. We were won over within minutes: those incomplete backgrounds soon felt like somewhere we could happily stay. It is a funny, gentle film, and the strongest reason we have for recommending Patar’s work, though its modest story will not satisfy anyone wanting much complication.
His films need to be considered as collaborations, particularly with Stéphane Aubier. The partnership ran through Pic Pic André Show (1995) and the television series Panique au village (2002) before the feature A Town Called Panic (2009). In the Panic series, plastic figures stumble from ordinary mishaps into increasingly absurd adventures, with Patar also supplying Horse’s voice. The busy succession of visual jokes has an obvious drawback at feature length: when everything escalates, the next escalation can feel rather familiar.
Ernest & Celestine offers a marked change from those plastic figures, with Benjamin Renner joining Patar and Aubier as co-director. Daniel Pennac’s screenplay draws on Gabrielle Vincent’s children’s books, and the mouse and bear give the humour a relationship worth attending to. It would be misleading to credit Patar alone for the result. His appetite for mischief survives the change, but here the friendship is worth more than another gag.
The unfinished-looking drawing is the most persuasive decision. Leaving the shops to fade into white keeps the eye on the characters, while the loose colour makes the surroundings feel welcoming rather than meticulously arranged. There is pleasure in being allowed to notice how a picture is made; the film does not need to fill every corner to convince us of its world. Its slightness remains a limitation, but we would rather spend time with this mouse and bear than have their friendship padded out.
Patar has continued with shorts, specials and series, including Chien Pourri, into the 2020s. That seems a sensible home for a taste for mishaps that need not all sustain a feature. Start with Ernest & Celestine; the plastic village requires a greater tolerance for commotion.
Biography
Vincent Patar is a Belgian director and screenwriter of animated films. Born on 2 September 1965, he trained at the École supérieure des arts Saint-Luc de Liège and the École nationale supérieure des arts visuels de La Cambre in Brussels.
He has collaborated extensively with Stéphane Aubier. Together they created the stop-motion television series A Town Called Panic and its 2009 feature film adaptation. Patar co-directed the 2012 animated feature Ernest & Celestine with Aubier and Benjamin Renner; the film received the César Award for Best Animated Film.
