Le Petit Poilu in concert: a fresh take on music and movement in comics

 

Le Petit Poilu in concert: a fresh take on music and movement in comics

A “BD-Concert” at the Comics Art Museum in Brussels, Belgium. June 10, 2023

 

Reviewed by Laurie Anne Agnese

 

 

 

 

 On a Saturday morning in June, in a small room just off the busy and bright majestic art nouveau hall of the Comics Art Museum in Brussels, three rows of small children were sitting on the steps in front of a stage with two musicians and a screen.  Their parents, seated in chairs behind them, were coaxing them to be quiet and still.  For some of these children as young as 2 or 3 years old, this was their first live concert; for nearly all, it was their first BD concert. 

 

 The BD concerts were programmed for the museum’s temporary exhibit of Le Petit Poilu (on display until August 15 2023), the popular wordless bande dessinée series that the Belgian cartoonist Pierre Bailly and scriptwriter Céline Fraipont created for preschool children. What is special about Le Petit Poilu is how children as young as 3 years old can read the pictures on their own and understand these complex stories independently of their parents. 

 

 The performance, the first of three scheduled that day, combined projected images from the comic to original live music. The concept leaned into the unique comic forms of Le Petit Poilu, while borrowing cinematic techniques to draw out the tensions and meaning of the story.  Stéphane Arbon, wrote the score, and Christophe Bardon performed the live soundtrack mixing blues, rock and jazz to bring to life one of the older and better known stories in the series, Pagaille au Potager (Garden Frenzy).  The two have been collaborating for more than twenty years, both as TOTOF et le grand orchestre intended for kids, and other collaborations.

 

 In Pagaille au Potager, Petit Poilu starts his day like any ordinary preschooler - waking up and getting ready. But on his way to school, he falls down a mysterious hole and digs himself out into a lush, oversized garden where he has fantastical adventures with a group of friendly insects.

 

The good times are interrupted with the seemingly gratuitous aggression of a bee who attacks and stings Poilu’s red nose that balloons with pain. The group sets out to enact their own revenge on the Bee.  But during the dramatic confrontation, Petit Poilu witnesses the Bee’s troubling situation, pauses and dares to react with kindness, offering the Bee a chance to be friends. This is a classic Poilu story, mixing fantasy together with real world empathy. 

 

 

 Pagaille au Potager was the first Le Petit Poilu series to be made into an episode of the animated series, transforming the twenty-eight page wordless album into a fast-paced seven minute cartoon. This version, with characters sometimes speaking in balderdash and other nonsensical sounds, is entertaining and quick to the point, but more defined and narrower than the comic.

 

 

The BD concert is a fresh interpretation of the story, and rich with the human touch of the expressive line drawings, well-developed plot lines, and the live percussion and stringed instruments. At forty minutes long, the concert significantly slowed down the story, particularly the pacing of the visuals, allowing the audience to linger on the panels for much longer than they would while silently reading. The overall effect still gives enough space for interpretation, and feels true to the comic’s original form. The slide show, for example, played with the concept of the page in comics, carefully timing the display of still images, one next to the other, eventually filling the entire screen.

In other vignettes, basic cinematic techniques such panning, zooming, or animation, brought gentle movement to the characters and textures to the story, and were meant to direct the eye to emphasize beauty of the illustrations or highlight the tensions in the story. The score, however, was the consistent cinematic throughline; the original songs punctuated with sound effects, is playful and resonant, and in itself a reference to the musicality of the original comic.

Because of its use of structure and repetition, Le Petit Poilu is not silent at all, but actually quite musical and rhythmic. Arbon and Bardon’s interpretation and musical performance had much to add to the emotional richness of the story.

 

All photos and video taken by Laurie Anne Agnese

 

 

Exhibition review: Carrément poilu at the Comics Art Museum, Brussels

Carrément Poilu. Sophie Baudry (curator). Brussels: Comics Art Museum, October 20, 2022 - August 15, 2023.

 

reviewed by  Laurie Anne Agnese

 

Carrément Poilu (Squarely Furry), an exhibition celebrating Le Petit Poilu (Little Furry), is currently on view at the Comics Art Museum in Brussels.  In 2007, the Belgian cartoonist Pierre Bailly and scriptwriter Céline Fraipont created the bande dessinée for preschool children; it has since expanded into an animated cartoon series and Dupuis will release the 28th album in March 2023. Le Petit Poilu’s world, his empathy and his penchant for humor also grows with each adventure and each album.  Like the comic itself, this playful and interactive exhibition offers something for visitors of all ages but especially for fans of the comic.  

 

The colorful entrance signals that this is a special comics exhibit - a small door welcomes just children under 5, and a larger one for everyone else.

 

 

There are no words, dialogue or narration in Le Petit Poilu. Children as young as three years old enjoy reading these wildly complex visual stories on their own.  Since the albums can be read independently without their parents, Bailly and Fraipont speak directly to their youngest readers. “Wordless comics may have the strength to be able to speak to children as equals with a whole series of strategies to convey emotion, poetry, things like that” says Bailly in a video interview playing at the exhibit (translation from French is mine). 

 

Le Petit Poilu balances simple and fun adventure stories with serious themes such as migration, gender or playground aggression. Bailly and Fraipont put immense care into the sequencing of the story and ultimately a great deal of trust in children: “We offer them an opportunity to go very far in their capacities, in their intelligence to be able to decipher a story, even at 3 years old. I think it makes children, as soon as they bite, want to taste it again.”

 

Once in the exhibit hall, children immediately notice the free maps of the exhibit and without words or instructions, they also know exactly what to do with them.  The maps showed the layout and also gave them a mission at each stop: find the colored stamps to complete the map. The map is also self-referent to the series. It is a souvenir to take, like Petit Poilu, who always returns home with a special object from his adventures.

Photo credit: Daniel Fouss/Comics Art Museum

 

There are several large enclosed wooden cubes with small entrances that invite visitors to get low to the ground and discover what is inside.  There was a note to give priority to the youngest visitors, but families tended to explore the cubes together. So the young and the old climbed, jumped, hid and crawled through each of them and immersed themselves in these unique worlds that reference particular stories in the series. 

 

Each album of Le Petit Poilu follows a similar structure with endless variety, like the daily life of a preschool child.  Poilu wakes up, uses a toilet that is too big for him, eats breakfast, says goodbye to his parents and walks to school. But then something strange and magnificent happens. He discovers a new universe and an unexpected adventure awaits him. The cubes capture this magical turning point: bright, vivid images from the bande dessinée combined with the sensory experiences of music and textures to depict this triggering event that puts the story into motion.

 

For example, the cube for La Sirène Gourmande (the first album in the series) is an underwater story where a large hungry mermaid swallows Le Petit Poilu, and he lands in a pile of rubbish that is her belly where the adventure to get out takes place.  The cube is awash in the beautiful underwater imagery and sounds, and the belly of trash is soft.

 

 

 

 

One very small cube discreetly sits in an unremarkable corner, and could be mistaken for a mouse hole. Once down on the ground, the visitor sees that it depicts the adventures in Madame Miniscule, where the size is turned upside down, and Le Petit Poilu as the child is large, and the adults and all of the objects around them are very small in comparison.

 

 

Because of its clever use of structure and repetition, Le Petit Poilu has a musical and rhythmic quality.  Each story hits similar moments with visual cues: Poilu shakes hands with a friendly character who will help him in the conflict; he looks longingly at a photo of his mother to give him courage to face the mounting adversity, and when the problem has resolved itself, he receives a special object to take home. All 27 objects from his 27 adventures are collected in a special cabinet adorned overhead with his clown nose:

 

 

 

 Like Alice in Wonderland and The Phantom Tollbooth, Le Petit Poilu is ultimately a voyage and return adventure story. Once he receives the special object, the story ends by unspooling itself: Poilu returns home, reunites with his parents, eats dinner, and goes to bed. All alone in his room, he checks his bag and finds the object that he received - proof that the magical adventure took place - and brings both his world and the magical one together.

 

Lining the perimeter of the hall, large reproductions from the albums, sketches, original artwork and descriptive panels invite parents and children to learn together about the creation and backstory of the comic.  These panels are kept simple and placed at sight level to interest the younger visitors, but in reality, I did not see many children looking at them. They explained the process of creating a wordless comic, which starts with words and storyboarding first. Other panels highlighted the process of creating the look of Le Petit Poilu from a drop of ink.

 

 

 The exhibit ends with two adjacent rooms - one is furnished with a soft rug, floor cushions, and low bookshelves with multiple sets of the entire series available to read; the other features a television screen. Many visitors lingered there for nearly an hour.  It is a unique opportunity to read all 27 albums in one uninterrupted sweep, and visitors approached it in their own way. Some parents sat down on the floor and read the books to their children - that is, the parent created and narrated a story out loud from the pictures. Some children and parents were side by side reading silently to themselves.

 

Photo credit: Daniel Fouss/Comics Art Museum

Photo credit: Daniel Fouss/Comics Art Museum
 

 The other room features a looped video interview with Bailly and Fraipont.  The bench for watching is full-sized, and is surrounded by small sketches hung high.  In the video, the sound is off, and the subtitles are on - squarely aiming this space for the adults, perhaps to distract them long enough to leave the children alone to read the books. 

 

In the video interview, Bailly remarks how sometimes “words freeze and block things.” Drawing on a parallel with the silent films of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, he adds “there is not only burlesque, there are also a lot of emotions and humanity. This kind of intimacy with character is something that we can understand and feel without words.” In the albums, as well as the exhibit, there is space for fantasy within the reader and for their own words to tell the story.

 

 

 All photos taken by Laurie Anne Agnese unless otherwise noted.

 

 

ANIMA: The Brussels Animation Film Festival 2020

The annual Brussels Animation Film Festival, officially known as ANIMA, takes place this year over the last two weekends of February, timed perfectly with the Carnival school holidays. Offering a wide range of national and international all-ages programming, ANIMA will screen 300 films over 10 days at the Flagey Cultural Centre and the Palace movie theatre. The festival also devotes a bulk of its resources to engaging with young children through interactive installations, exhibitions and animation workshops. This appeal toward pre-school and elementary school kids is telegraphed by the poster for this year’s festival which features a cameo by Petit Poilu, the popular character of a BD series of pantomime comics drawn by Belgian cartoonist Pierre Bailly.

The poster for ANIMA 2020 by Pierre Bailly. Petit Poilu is the character in the left-center of the seated audience with the black face and red nose.

The opening event for ANIMA 2020 was the screening of L’extraordinaire voyage de Marona, which had debuted at several animation festivals at the end of 2019 but was now making its Belgian premiere.

The most striking aspect of the film from a comics perspective is the aesthetic of the animation itself. Belgian comics artist Brecht Evens served as the graphic consultant for the film, responsible for establishing the visual style and character design. Both Brecht Evens and director Anca Damian were present at the opening event to present their collaboration.

Director Anca Damian (centre) and Brecht Evens (right) at the ANIMA kickoff event. Photo by Nick Nguyen.

Director Anca Damian (right) and Brecht Evens (centre) at the ANIMA kickoff event. Photo by Nick Nguyen.

Brecht Evens spoke about how he was brought on board the project via the persistence of director Anca Damian, who sought him out immediately after reading his comics to insist that his vision was exactly what she was looking for to portray the world of the film as seen through the eyes of a puppy. With his usual charm and humour, Evens humbly clarified his role in merely establishing the visual library for the film, and gave full credit to the film’s animators for the labour in making that vision come to life. The trailer for the film (presented below with English subtitles) offers a glimpse into how these animators did justice to the Evens style.

 L’extraordinaire voyage de Marona marks Brecht Evens’ first foray into the world of animation, and he follows in the wake of other fellow Euro comics cartoonists making their inroads into feature-length animated films (Emile Bravo and Lorenzo Mattotti, among others, come to mind). Here’s hoping that films like Marona reach a wider audience so that more unique visions and styles from the comics world can be expressed through audiovisual images.

Nick Nguyen