DoublePlusBon notifies us that the cartoon series that French animation studio Blue Spirit was producing for Canal+ is currently being aired. Ovni (a French acronym, roughly the equivalent of the English UFO) is based on the comic book of the same name, written by Lewis Trondheim, with art by Fabrice Parme. It was their third project together, after the series Le Roi Catastrophe (starting in 2000 for Delcourt) and Venezia (2002, for Dargaud).
Ovni tells the many adventures of a little spaceman who crashes on earth sometime in the Age of the Dinosaurs, and starts looking for ways to repair his spaceship. This takes him through the various phases in history, until he arrives in a future earth, which has sufficiently evolved technology to help him get away again. What’s striking about the story, however, is the way it is visualised. In a manner that can only be described as “Where’s Wally meets Multipath Adventures”, Ovni’ story is told in large, full-page illustrations. Each of these shows a number of possible routes or options Ovni can take, and all but one end in a gruesome death. It’s like a videogame on paper, and half the fun is not necessarily in finding out the most successful route, but rather discovering what torture and pain Parme and Trondheim have in store for the poor little blue alien.
(production art from the animated version of Ovni by Blue Spirit)
Translating this to a purely linear medium like animation may be tricky, but Blue Spirit has done a very good job. Watching the cartoon is like looking over the shoulder of a computer game player, and seeing him discovering the right solution to an adventure’s riddles. This may potentially get very boring, but Blue Spirit keeps up the pace, and also adds sufficient variation in the way the different storylines are linked together to keep the cartoon quite entertaining. And with plenty of nutty videogame-type sound effects and a (un)healthy dose of cartoon carnage, these stories are clearly made for the tastes of a public hooked on the likes of Fairly Odd Parents or Spongebob Squarepants.
(the opening sequence of Ovni shows our hapless wee blue alien being whisked through different epochs of history, usually just before being killed in an inventive manner; great fun for Road Runner fans!)
Check out DoublePlusBon for production art from the cartoons, and production house Blue Spirit’s website for a the first episode and a rather less wholesome episode set in World War II (the style of depiction of the black GI is perhaps too reminiscent of 40s and 50s unflattering comics depictions of coloured people for comfort – Joe). The original graphic novel of Ovni is published by Delcourt.
Wim Lockefeer lives in Belgium where small blue aliens are commonplace, although these are legal aliens as many Smurfs have adopted Belgian nationality; you can read more of his thoughts on his own Ephemerist blog.
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