The Sunday supplement: #50

A new podcast about terrible books, oddball favorites from the year in reading/listening/watching, some new films to look forward to

From “Little Nicholas Happy as Can Be” (2022)

I don’t watch many animated movies, but I’m excited for Little Nicholas: Happy as Can Be, I might even go see it in the theater. It’s a film about Jean-Jacques Sempé and René Goscinny, creators of the French character Petit Nicolas.

From Variety:

Here is a movie, co-written by Goscinny’s daughter Anne, about a friendship between two artists that spawned one of France’s most successful kid-lit phenoms: a carefree middle-class kid (voiced by Simon Faliu) who adores planes, detests girls and makes a mess out of practically any situation. Six years older than Sempé (played by Laurent Lafitte), Goscinny (Alain Chabat) is perhaps better known for co-creating Asterix. (As a wink to his fans, a figurine of the Gallic warrior and big buddy Obelix sits on his desk in the film.) Both men moved to Paris aspiring to be illustrators. Sempé joined the army at 17, knowing it would take him to the capital. Goscinny first spent a few years in New York, where he worked alongside Mad magazine cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman, but found the greatest success back in Paris as a writer. If you want to know their story — how they met and where the ideas for Little Nicholas’ little universe came from — then “Little Nicholas” is for you.

The trailer makes it look really lovingly made: