Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol: animating for an auteur

Walking the Dog was involved in making Chomet's celebrated feature debut, The Triplets of Belleville, so Goossens was aware of his particular approach to animation. But an added challenge was that Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol would be Chomet’s first digitally animated feature, which meant adapting his more hands-on approach to the digital world.

For example, Chomet does not work with a layout, a detailed storyboard that is usually turned into an animatic to guide the animators. "Normally this is a basic element of an animation production, so that you know exactly what is happening in each shot and each sequence," Goossens explains.

To fill this gap, Walking the Dog proposed an alternative approach. They hired a studio at Monev in Sint-Pieters-Leeuw, close to Brussels, and engaged actors with the same physical builds as the characters in the script. Chomet then came in to guide the actors through the scenes, establishing the action and framing. Filmed and edited together, this produced a live-action layout for the animators to work with.

“This is not like rotoscoping, which copies each person 100% to produce an animation. It was more like using the action and the exact framing of the characters as a very clear reference and animating around it,” Goossens says.

Together with the character designs produced in Paris and an initial dialogue recording, this gave the animators in Walking the Dog’s studio enough information to produce a rough animation that could be sent back to Chomet for approval.

Then it was the turn of another department to take over to produce the ‘in-betweens’. “This is a very specific and demanding department, because it asks the animators to copy the approved drawings of the rough animation,” Goossens says. “This is something we had already done to a very high level for Ari Folman’s film Where is Anne Frank?”

Meanwhile, Walking the Dog was also asked to generate all the CGI elements needed for the movie, ranging from small props to large elements such as cars. “We prepared all the CGI models and integrated them in sequences, for example when there is an interaction between a 3D prop and an animated character.”

A further department was then set up to handle the ink and paint phase, which adds the colors to the initial animation based on very detailed color palets they received from the art director. Chomet has a very specific touch when he draws, and none of the brushes in the Toon Boom software used on the production quite matched.

“So we worked together with the Toon Boom research and development department in Canada, and after two or three months they were able to programme a brush that was specific for this movie,” Goossens says.

Walking the Dog was also able to set up an informal ‘school of Chomet’ to make sure the animation progressed quickly. “We had four animators who had worked on Triplets or The Illusionist, or both, who could teach the Sylvain Chomet animation style to the younger animators, and so on down the line, so the learning curve was a lot shorter.”

Finally, Walking the Dog was asked to do a part of the compositing of the movie, which brings together all the elements made for the film into a single image.

In addition to the work done in Flanders, which accounted for around 70% of the movie, this included some in-betweens that had been contracted out to a studio in Vietnam, and the backgrounds, which were produced by Doghouse Films, Walking the Dog’s sister company in Luxembourg.

“We started work on the film in 2022, and with all these departments, two years later we had 90-95 people working on the film,” Goossens says. With two other major animated features in production in Flanders during the same period, the competition for talent was sometimes intense. “But we were able to pick up animators when they stopped working on these other projects and integrate them into our teams.”

Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol was produced by What The Prod and Picture Box (Mediawan) in France, together with Bidibul Productions in Luxembourg and Walking the Dog in Belgium. Financial support from Screen Flanders, Screen Brussels and the Film Fund of the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (VAF) came together with support though the Belgian tax shelter via Beside Group to bring €4.8 million to the production, which had a total budget of €15.9 million. A total of €7 million was spent in Belgium.