Zep

A boy of about ten with a blond quiff that stands straight up sits in a classroom drawn in the same primary colours as he is. That is the whole of Zep's cinema so far. Titeuf (2011), which he wrote, directed and shared the score for, is the strip he has been drawing since 1992 put on a screen for 87 minutes. The line is his own: thick black outlines, flat fields of colour, enormous heads and almost no shading. Max Braslavsky's production design keeps the adults' home and shops in the same toy colours, so nothing a grown-up owns looks any more serious than a satchel.

Zep began publishing comics at Spirou in 1985, after training in Geneva; Titeuf arrived in 1992 and grew, through Glénat, into one of the best-selling children's comics in the French-speaking world, then a television series. The film is a faithful extension of that rather than a new thing, and most critics have said so; we would not argue. What he does well on paper he does well on screen: childhood seen from child height, with school and family and bodies treated as the large matters they are when you are ten.

Where the film improves on the albums is the parents. The rows between Papa and Maman are heard rather than seen, half understood, and Zep leaves them half understood; nobody sits the boy down to explain. It moved us more than a film with this many fart jokes had any business doing, because Titeuf keeps making plans and we can see, as he cannot, that none of them will work on his mother and father. Rochefort, as Pépé, gets the quiet minutes and plays them tired in the right way. The imagination sequences are the other reason to watch: a prologue among dinosaurs, a psychologist (Jean-Luc Couchard) who follows the boy about inside his head, and a song on the roof of a moving train, the one stretch built for a screen bigger than a television. The score, by Zep with Nicolas Neidhardt, bounces along and is never in the way. Against that, the girls are drawn as thinly as the strip has always drawn them, and much of the wordplay dies in subtitles.

Zep has said of directing it: "Le cinéma est une espèce de rêve ultime pour quelqu'un comme moi qui raconte des histoires." Having had the dream once, he has gone back to Titeuf albums, to graphic novels for adults and to music, and of his 2024 record he has said he did not want to make Titeuf in song. One film in a career of nearly forty years is a visit, not a filmography. If he comes back, we would like it to be with a script that trusts the divorce as much as it trusts the dinosaurs.