For Jeremy Zag, the film’s writer, producer, and director, his aspirational origin story about finding the courage to believe in yourself and trust your friends, set in the beautiful city of Paris with cinematic-quality, action-packed animation and 10 new songs, makes a winning combination for new audiences and ‘Miraculer’ superfans alike; now streaming on Netflix.
With last Friday’s Netflix release of Miraculous: Ladybug & Cat Noir, The Movie, based on the hugely popular, award-winning Miraculous - Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir series, audiences this summer are being treated to an action-packed origin story centered around the show’s titular young heroes: Marinette/Ladybug and Adrien/Cat Noir.
In the franchise’s first feature film, written, produced, and directed by Jeremy Zag (he also composed the music and co-wrote the 10 new songs), we find an ordinary shy teenager, Marinette, whose life in Paris suddenly goes superhuman when she is given the Miraculous gem and transformed into the superhero Ladybug. Bestowed with magical powers of creation, Ladybug must unite with her secret crush, wealthy schoolmate Adrien, also transformed by a Miraculous gem into a superhero - Cat Noir - to save Paris as a new villain unleashes chaos on the city. Neither knows who the other’s identity. Nor do they know the villain, Hawk Moth, is Adrien’s father, the millionaire fashion designer Gabriel Agreste. How will they feel about each other once the masks come off?
Zag and Bettina López Mendoza wrote the film’s original screenplay. Aton Soumache, Zag, and Daisy Shang produce and executive produce. The animation is produced by ON Animation Studios Montréal.
Take a look at the trailer:
Though confident the franchise’s characters were ripe for a musical feature film adaptation, Zag knew the effort would be challenging. How do you distill down what’s worked best over the series’ five seasons into a movie with a new take on characters that “Miraculer” superfans love within a story they’ve never seen before? That new audiences will love as well.
“The main challenge in bringing this popular series to the big screen was to condense the treatment of 10 main characters (Ladybug, Marinette, Cat Noir, Adrien, Hawk Moth, Gabriel, Master Fu, and the three kwamis) into a 90-minute movie and still make it appealing to newcomers and fans alike,” says Zag. “The series has dived into the lives of our well-known heroes for 5 seasons now and has gathered an active audience for about 8 years. I wanted to bring to the world a never-seen-before singing superhero movie and give the opportunity to the fans to invite their loved ones to discover their favorite universe.”
Audiences are used to animated shows filled with song. Few, however, realize how difficult integrating music and sound makes an already grueling production process. Throw in writing original songs in a timely manner to allow that integration without costly, time-consuming changes… the challenges get even greater.
“Music actually came first into the process,” Zag explains. “It’s the way I can best share emotions with the team, as music expresses beyond what any words can say. I first built the movie through music and songs to tell a simple story, accessible to the entire family. The intentions and storytelling of the film are also present in each song, and you could almost follow the film by keeping only the scenes that are songs.”
He continues, “I compose the songs on the piano with the messages and key words that will be at the heart of the lyrics. Then, I give them to arrangers, musicians, and lyricists who take them to another level, and simultaneously to the storyboarders to start building the visual aspect of the movie so that the music always guides the narrative and animation.”
Zag surrounded himself with a top team of music professionals: Harvey Mason Jr., Michael Gracey, Chris Read, Britt Burton, Maxime Boutboul and musicians from the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Air Studio and Los Angeles Recording Academy. “And obviously great singers, Lou [Marinette/Ladybug] and Drew [Ryan Scott – Adrien/Cat Noir],” he says. “Their recorded performance helped the animators grasp the very detailed movements to integrate that into the animation.”
And how do you make a superhero movie that’s appreciably different from what feels like the “Superhero Film Du Jour” bombarding audiences these days from all directions? According to Zag, “We live in a world where people praise external validation over internal confidence, and our ambition is to bring characters that help the young generation believe in themselves and discover themselves through the story. What sets Miraculous heroes apart is that our core intention is to showcase girl empowerment. Our vision was to launch a new universe, not of muscular superheroes, but of iconic, aspirational, big-hearted superheroines... who can embody the message that the true hero in us is the one behind the mask. I also wanted to portray heroes that are not heirs or whose destinies are already set, but rather heroes that come from ordinary backgrounds and have to overcome their fears and have confidence to become who they are and want to be.”
Set “as a new verse” in the franchise, the film goes back to the origins of the main characters, the reasons why they were chosen and how they became superheroes. “We stayed close to the original series DNA.” Zag reveals. “It was important to capture the character arcs of the series, the ever-growing love story between our two main characters, Ladybug/Marinette and Cat Noir/Adrien, magic powers and of course Paris! Yet, we chose to dive more into our characters’ emotional thinking and break free from some side storylines to make the movie intergenerational and accessible to everyone, even those unfamiliar with the Miraculous universe.”
And while the story was built using original series DNA, the animation, though based on initial series designs, was completely created from scratch. All the assets – models and rigs – were brand new to reach the higher production quality and standards of cinematic animation. “The movie assets are more complex and detailed to allow us to be more precise in animation, surfacing and compositing,” Zag says, noting the work went back and forth between teams in Paris, Montréal, and Los Angeles.
“Overall production, including development, production and post, took 5 years – with 2 of those years in the heart of the COVID pandemic,” Zag shares. “Development and pre-production - rebuilding the assets, story development… - was about 1.5 years. Once the story was set, we dove into production, which involved gathering approximately 300 people for 3 years. Post took approximately 4-6 months.”
As the film’s writer, director, producer, composer, and song co-writer, Zag has been more than busy weaving together his superhero tale set on the streets of Paris. Asked how 5 seasons worth of series production experience helped him on the movie, Zag shares, “This production was pretty special, as we had to adapt our ways of working due to the pandemic. Overnight, at the ramp up of the production, we had to learn to work remotely, exchanging only via Zoom. Aside from that, what was appreciably different from the series production is that we could iterate more on the story editing in order to grasp the essence of the story told. I worked on a storyboard process longer on this movie, we could test in screenings if the movie was working, and then iterate on the parts that needed to be revised to work best.”
“I am a true lover of animation, series and movies alike,” he concludes, “so all my experience in TV production helped me tremendously with the movie – I had only more time to do it and more space for storytelling.”
Dan Sarto is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Animation World Network.
