Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Ernest & Celestine
2012 · Stéphane Aubier · Ernest & Celestine on Sightlines
Watch the corner of the frame. A wash of grey-blue travels outward, goes pale, and stops. What's under it is paper. Nobody painted that part, and nobody is pretending they meant to. In most animated features the world runs to the edge and implies more beyond it. Here the picture admits it sits on a sheet, and that the sheet is bigger than the world.
Deleuze made one sharp remark about cartoons, and it's the key to this film. The drawing in an animated film is never a pose. It's a figure caught in the act of forming or coming apart, sampled at what he called any-instant-whatever: ordinary, equidistant slices of movement, no one of them the noble moment. That was cinema's break with the older arts. A sculptor picks the instant that sums a gesture up. A camera takes twenty-four a second and doesn't rank them. Animation is the extreme case, because every one of those unranked instants had to be drawn by somebody's hand.
Most animation spends its money hiding that hand. Benjamin Renner spends this film's on showing it. The line wobbles. Contours stay loose, ink laid down fast and left alone. The washes bloom and fade instead of filling. The result isn't crudeness. It's the sketchbook's particular time, the sense of a drawing still being decided. His invention is sustaining that at feature length, where the temptation to tidy is enormous.
He had permission from specific places. The Triplets of Belleville had already proved a caricatured, wobbling line could carry ninety minutes without CGI smoothing, which is what licenses Ernest's loose contours. Les Armateurs and producer Didier Brunner had built a house style on Kirikou and the Sorceress: flat, hand-painted, unmodulated color, no digital gloss. The Snowman showed a picture book could be animated with its crayon grain intact, soft and deliberately un-inked. And the 1977 Winnie the Pooh invented the device this film perfects, painted backgrounds dissolving into bare white page-space.
That white does real work. Deleuze has a name for space that quits serving as a setting for action: any-space-whatever, and in one variant it is simply emptiness, a white field. Usually that means modernist desolation, a character stranded where the world used to be. Here the empty field is the page, and it's warm. It also does something odd to the frame. What lies outside a shot is normally more world, the next room or the street. Sometimes it's a whole you can't point at. In this film the fade at the edge opens onto the material the story is being made on, which is nowhere in the story at all. And against expressionism's blacks and shadow-gradients, Deleuze set a cinema of light and white, the other option, the one that declines to descend. A film about two species who raise their children on monster stories could easily have gone dark. This one lives on unpainted paper. That's where "gentleness as a moral position" stops being a compliment and becomes a technique. Gentleness is a decision about how much of the frame to fill.
Now the fable. Bears above ground, mice below, each society raising its young on horror stories about the other. Deleuze calls a crowd rendered as one feeling a dividual, a collective that behaves as a single affective unit, and that is precisely what each world is: one shared fear, told to every child, holding the whole thing together. In his chapters on political cinema he describes fabulation, people caught in the act of legending themselves, inventing a people that doesn't yet exist. Ernest & Celestine shows the same machine running in its uglier direction first. Each society has made itself a people by inventing the other as a monster. The monsters are load-bearing.
This is why the lens matters, and why the plot is stranger than the film's charm suggests. Celestine, an orphan, is being processed toward a dental career she doesn't want. Ernest is hungry and wants an artistic outlet. When they become friends they become criminals, and not only because they steal. Two societies that need each other as monsters cannot tolerate a counterexample walking around in daylight. Their bond is illegal in the precise sense that it unmakes the story each crowd needs in order to stay one crowd.
Which forces the film toward its real climax: a courtroom. Deleuze sets a hinge between the action-image, where conflict is fought and the situation changes, and thought proper. On that hinge sits the image where a conflict stops being fought and gets figured instead, staged and argued and put into speech. The trial is that architecture in its purest form, an image posing a problem it cannot settle by force. Odd thing to build a children's film toward, until you notice there is no villain anywhere in it. Totoro is the model there, unhurried domestic tenderness driving the drama instead of a bad guy. With no villain, the antagonist is a story, and you can't punch a story. You can only argue it down in front of the crowd that believes it.
Meanwhile the motor keeps running. Aubier and Patar bring A Town Called Panic's deadpan timing and clattering slapstick escalation to the chases and to the courtrooms themselves, so the old sensory-motor circuitry stays at full power while the argument gets made. That's the craft trick worth stealing. The film is a movement-image in perfect health, carrying a discourse it never once announces.
What it changed: it made the unfinished look legible as a choice rather than a symptom of budget, at a scale that took a César and an Oscar nomination with it, and the hand-drawn revival that followed inherited the permission. It also answered a problem children's cinema keeps failing. Draw a world that is visibly still being made, put the prejudice on trial, let the slapstick carry the weight, and nobody has to be lectured.
Rewatch it for the edges. Watch where the paint stops, and ask who decided that's where the world ends. The film can show two individuals refusing their assigned story. The people who could actually live with no monsters above and none below are still missing when it finishes. The film leaves them room, and leaves the room unpainted.
Concepts in play
- any-instant-whatever — Deleuze's account of the cartoon (the drawing as a figure always forming or dissolving) made literal by Renner's breathing sketchbook linework and washes that bloom and fade rather than settling into finished poses.
- any-space-whatever (emptiness) — Painted backgrounds dissolving into bare white page-space, the Winnie the Pooh (1977) device the film inherits and perfects: white fields that host the figures without functioning as a setting.
- out-of-field-absolute — Watercolor washes that bloom and fade at the frame's edges, so what lies beyond the image is not an adjacent room but the unpainted paper the film is made on.
- lyrical-abstraction — A monster-story premise handled entirely in light and unmodulated white rather than shadow-gradient; the un-inked page as the technical basis for the film's gentleness-as-morality.
- dividual — Bears above and mice below, each society raised on horror stories about the other — two crowds each held together as a single shared fear.
- fabulation / legending — The horror stories each world tells its young: a people constituting itself by inventing the other as a monster, with an orphan mouse artist and a bear craving an artistic outlet forced to tell a different one.
- the people are missing — Their friendship scandalizes both societies and turns into outlawry; the pair belongs to no existing people, and the film ends without one having formed around them.
- discourse-image (the Figure) — The courtroom sequences named in the film's craft debts, where the conflict is argued rather than fought because the antagonist is a prejudice, not a villain.
- movement-image — A Town Called Panic's deadpan timing and clattering slapstick escalation driving the chases and trial scenes — the sensory-motor circuit at full power beneath the fable.