Cinema. Cannes Film Festival: Marcel Pagnol continues to make his mark on the Croisette with an animated film.

In 1955, Marcel Pagnol chaired the jury at the Cannes Film Festival and awarded the first Palme d'Or in its history to Delbert Mann's Marty , an American romance. Pagnol, an English teacher in the 1920s, discovered talkies in 1929 and abandoned theater for it.

In 1932, he founded his production company and studios in Marseille, marking the beginning of a prolific career. His films, such as Le Gendre de Monsieur Poirier (1933) and Topaze (1951), demonstrate a director who is an author and an outstanding dialogue writer. "Pagnol is a craftsman of language," admires Sylvain Chomet. The apparent simplicity of Pagnolesque verbs masks its complexity. Seventy years later, Sylvain Chomet brings Pagnol back to the Croisette 2025 , with a beautiful animated portrait of the Provençal academic, screened this Saturday in a special screening: Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol is also expected in June at the Annecy Animated Film Festival.

Known for his cult films like Marius , Topaze or The Baker's Wife , Pagnol is often reduced to his love of Provence . Sylvain Chomet broadens the scope, sometimes surprisingly, when he portrays Pagnol as inventor: "He worked on perpetual motion machines since he was very young." This taste for mechanics and innovation runs through the film, where we discover the Topazette, his prototype "people's car" as audacious as it is dangerous.

A delightful anecdote, ultimately left out of the script, illustrates this unexpected Pagnol: in his youth, while living in an apartment beneath André Malraux's, one of his machines sent a bolt through the floorboards, grazing the sleeping writer. "He almost killed Malraux!" jokes Chomet.

Sylvain Chomet, known for The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist , tells the story of Pagnol with his signature style, with vividly drawn characters. This is a fitting example of this "film about the perpetual movement of life," the cycles of joys and sorrows in the writer-filmmaker's existence.

In Le Château de ma mère , Pagnol wrote: "Such is the life of men, a few joys quickly erased by unforgettable sorrows." In the film, where the young Marcel talks with his adult double, exploring his childhood dreams and his struggles as an artist, these sorrows take the form of "dear shadows," ghosts like that of Pagnol's mother or brother.

Here are all the shadows of Pagnol's life: his dark period at the end of the war, marked by the sale of his studios, the destruction of a film, and a romantic breakup with Josette Day. "He took refuge in alcohol," reveals Chomet, drawing on the confidences of Nicolas Pagnol, Marcel's grandson. The animated biopic does not avoid the great man's flaws—you should always look on the back of the images.

The animation incorporates images from the films of Pagnol the filmmaker. "It brings us back to reality, to people from the cinema we want to see again," says Chomet. The animated part is in keeping with the film archives: impersonator Thierry Garcia dubs the voices of Fernandel, Raimu, and others, in a sort of polyphony of legends, which brings the icons back to life without falling into the folklore of exaggerated accents.

Marcel and Monsieur Pagnol is not just a film about a man, but about cinema itself, its accidents, its encounters, and its dreams. Chomet, by deconstructing the myth, reveals a Pagnol driven by a quest for the absolute.