With their award-winning film now hitting select theaters across the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries, the directors discuss the unimagined success, with both kids and parents, of a movie about a child and an animal where the animal, for once, does not become the child’s best friend.
Before heading to the theaters to see their film, Chicken for Linda!, Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach think it’s only fair audiences should know one thing.
“It is a film with a child and an animal,” note the directors. “But, for once, the animal does not become the child’s best friend.”
Sorry Disney, but Linda’s chicken is destined to become dinner.
The 2D-animated Franco-Italian film has been finished for a year, but its career in festivals and theaters around the world continues to grow, making its way to Washington D.C., Dallas, San Diego, Honolulu, Portland (Maine) and Vancouver Friday, April 19 with distribution by GKIDS. Chicken for Linda! - a film about a mother who can’t cook and her strong-willed daughter trying to find a chicken for their chicken and peppers dinner amidst labor strikes in France – will also open in Seattle, Milwaukee and Chicago theaters on Friday, April 26. It has won the Animation Is Film Audience and Jury Awards, as well as Annecy International Animation Film Festival’s Cristal for Best Animated Feature Film.
Produced by Dolce Vita Films, Miyu Productions, Palosanto Films and France 3 Cinéma, this low-budget masterpiece’s gaining popularity is, to Malta and Laudenbach, nothing short of a miracle.
“We are now aware that the film is popular overall, and we are very happy about that, but when we wrote this story and came up with the tone and aesthetic of the movie, the challenge was quite big, and we couldn’t have imagined such a success,” both directors share. “Our commitment to direct voices, monochromacy, and fluctuating lines was quite ambitious, and we knew we were making a prototype. Even making this type of comedy is fairly unusual, at least in Europe, where animation films are often adventures or dramas.”
And where animals are friends, not food.
“So yes,” they continue, “each prize, each mark of recognition, is a gift for us because it means that such a film can exist and be appreciated, a film which is the opposite of almost everything that is done in animation by being a low-performance, inexpensive film.”
On top of the film’s busy linework and assigning of one color – and one color only – to encompass the design of each character, another unique trail blazed by Chicken for Linda! was the film’s portrayal of a loving and hostile mother-daughter relationship.
“It happened instinctively,” Malta and Laudenbach explain. “We really like Paulette, Linda’s mother, because she isn’t high-performance. She is not a supermom or an everyday superheroine like we’re used to seeing. She’s an ordinary woman, with her faults, her wanderings, and her flashes of brilliance as well. She is both charming and awkward. She is human.”
In fact, the film’s whole premise is based around the fact that Paulette feels guilty for wrongfully punishing Linda for stealing her ring. When Paulette finds out her daughter was innocent, she does what any average parent on the edge of sleep deprivation would do. She steals a chicken, which she’ll have to find a way to kill and cook later.
“Animation is a good tool to relate personalities like this,” the directors note. “Animation has this specificity that there is nobody on the screen, only lines, colors, and rhythm. Animation doesn’t lie because it asserts its distance from reality. It’s in this space, this distance, that the audience can enter and find their place. The work on the voices, recorded beforehand in real filming conditions, has already made it possible to anchor this mother-daughter relationship in something right, and true. Linda is played by an actual little girl, Melinée Leclerc, and Paulette is played by an actual mother, Clotilde Hesme. The design of these two characters also plays a role. They are both endearing. Paulette is even sexy. The animators took great pleasure in drawing them both and this is reflected in the final result. These are characters that we want to know and love.”
These ingredients, which Malta and Laudenbach have mixed into their feature feast with so much care, have made this story with dicey topics – chicken slaughter, labor strikes, single-parenting, and so forth – digestible and wonderfully humorous to both adults and kids.
“The film is very well received by all audiences,” concur the directors. “With this fanciful story and this aesthetic of derealization, children laugh while adults laugh and cry. This is the strength of cinema in general, but one of the specificities of animation. We would like to encourage adults without children to go and see it because we know that they will find in it something that speaks to them.”
Chicken for Linda! is not only being released theatrically in the United States and France, but also in Japan, Italy and Spain, and more releases, according to the directors, are being planned as well. While Malta and Laudenbach tried to make a film that would speak to everyone, they are both curious to see how the film will resonate globally, in different cultures that all have their own set of rules and commonalities when it comes to parenting or parent-child relationships.
“Even more than with the American public, we are curious to see how the film will resonate in Asia, which is culturally more distant from us,” say the directors. “Paulette slaps her daughter, which is a misdemeanor in Europe, and we have received criticism for it. But, most of all, we wanted to make a film that wouldn’t be too polite or very well-behaved. And a lot of people like it.”
And it’s true to the not-so-well-behaved nature of the film’s two leading ladies.
“It’s a film that’s funny and tender,” assure Malta and Laudenbach. “You just need to take the plunge, to push outside of your comfort zone a bit, and have a great time with a work that is unlike anything you know. A bit of freedom can’t hurt.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
