Fact sheet

Animated film with narration

Production year: 1987

Running time: 30 minutes

Production time: 5 years

Number of drawings: 20,000

Assistant: Lina Gagnon (3,000 in-betweens)

Technique: Prismacolor® coloured pencils on frosted cels, with pastel backgrounds and fixative

Most shots are presented as a series of crossfades and staggered mixes achieved through multiple exposures because cuts would break the narrative flow. "I used wax-based coloured pencils on frosted cels, which allowed me to work with several layers of transparency. I had to start much of it over again from scratch because I wanted an image that was both richer and softer. I had tried ink on cel overlays but wasn't getting the results I wanted, so I dropped those additions. The most important thing was to create an almost imperceptible progression in the story. It's like watching a tree grow: you don't really notice, but in the end..."
F.B.

One of the things that made this an exceptional project was that for the first time a literary text read by an actor was being turned into an animated film. Frédéric Back went to Paris to meet with Gallimard, then on to Provence to negotiate the rights to the story with Giono's daughters. He took advantage of the trip to study the region's landscapes and architecture. Next came the task of persuading Philippe Noiret to narrate the French version, and finding time in the actor's busy schedule to record the text. A Canadian big-name actor, Christopher Plummer, was asked to narrate the English version. It took Back five long years of painstaking work to complete the drawings, often using a magnifying glass! All the while, he was undergoing painful grafts and other treatments that ultimately failed to save the eye he had injured spraying fixative on a drawing for his film Crac!.

The subject matter of the film led Frédéric Back to employ a very sober drawing style and restrained animation so that people would pay attention to the words. "The more you animate, the less you hear, because there is always conflict between the eye and the ear," says the filmmaker. And since most people would see the film only once, he tried to include references to well-known images. At the beginning of the film, the allusion is to Bruegel and Goya, and as the vegetation returns, Impressionist paintings are evoked. Finally, the shepherd's features at the end of his life are reminiscent of a Leonardo da Vinci self-portrait.

Credits

A story by Jean Giono
Translated by Jean Roberts
Narrated by Christopher Plummer

Script and animation: Frédéric Back

Assistant: Lina Gagnon

Soundtrack and original music: Normand Roger
assisted by: Denis L. Chartrand

Sound recording: Hervé J. Bibeau

Mixing: Michel Descombes, André Gagnon

Camera: Claude Lapierre, Jean Robillard

Editing: Norbert Pickering

Quality control: Léo Faucher

Executive producer: Hubert Tison

Director: Frédéric Back

Produced by Société Radio-Canada, 1987