Walking the Dog Producer Eric Goossens Discusses the Making of Sylvain Chomet’s ‘A Magnificent Life’

EXCLUSIVE: French writer-director Sylvain Chomet’s latest movie A Magnificent Life (Marcel et Monsieur Pagnol) is among the high-profile animated features making their debut at the Cannes Film Festival this week. The eagerly anticipated third full-length feature from the four-time Oscar-nominated helmer (The Triplets of Belleville, The Illusionist) will be released by Sony Pictures Classics later in the year. The lovingly crafted 2D-animated film centers on the life of acclaimed French playwright and theater and film director Marcel Pagnol, who looks back at his storied life, aided by the magical appearance of his younger self — Little Marcel.

One of the film’s producers Eric Goossens of Belgium’s Walking the Dog (Charlotte, Where Is Anne Frank, Fox and Hare Save the Forest) was kind enough to answer a few of our questions prior to the film’s debut in Cannes.

Animation Magazine: Congrats on the excellent work your studio has delivered for Sylvain Chomet’s A Magnificent Life. How did this latest collaboration begin?

Eric Goossens: I believe they came to us around the end of 2022, at the request of Sylvain, to work together and co-finance the movie. The leads and supervisors were at Mediawan. So we did animation, in-between and ink & paint tests for the project at first. Sylvain doesn’t work with model sheets, so we had to find an ideal system with the line producers. To create the right reference guides for the animators, we had to film the entire movie with theater actors for three weeks in Brussel. This wasn’t rotoscopy or tracing, it was all used as reference for animation. Of course, we had to animate everything additionally when more specific movements were needed by the director. A selection of the shots were used to create the keyframes, so the animators would know the important shots (the beginning, the middle and the end). It helped determine the most important elements in the shot. The 2D designs from Paris were also used to determine the main keyframes.

So, for the first eight months, there was a little bit of trial and error involved to find the best way to work with the animators and to guide them on what Sylvain had in mind. We added a special department to make spot keys, adding more reference to the drawings of the art director. Originally it was planned for us to deliver the entire animation for the movie, but because there was so much time figuring out the pipeline, we lost seven months. However, the deadline remained the same (the end of 2024), so we agreed to give part of the animation work to our sister company in Luxembourg, Doghouse Films, which delivered about 12 minutes of the animation, and 15 minute were handled in Paris, and we ended up doing 65 minutes of animation. We also worked closely with Armada studio in Vietnam for the in-betweens.

We were very fortunate to have two amazing producers, Aton Soumache (The Little Prince, Little Nicholas) who was the in-house producer for Mediawan at the time, and Ashargin Poire, the man who started as the original producer and had the idea to make a documentary about Marcel Pagnol, and it eventually became a fully animated movie with Sylvain Chomet. Of course, the advantage to having Sylvain attached is that it was easier to finance the movie Overall, we worked on the movie nonstop for two years, even during the Christmas holidays. The atmosphere at the studio was very nice: Everyone was quite passionate about the project and worked day and night. We had about 120 people working on it here at Walking the Dog.

I believe this is first movie that Chomet has worked on that has been digitally animated. Which animation tools were used?

We used Toon Boom, and we worked very closely with them because the brush used by Sylvain is very specific, so they developed a tool which was very similar to the brush he was using in Triplets of the Belleville and The Illusionist. This was the first time Sylvain was working on a film with digital animation. They worked very hard to come up with seven different versions of the brush. It was very clear that we wanted to work with Toon Boom.

You also created some instances of CGI for the movie, right?

Yes, we did. We also did this back in 2001. We did all the CGI, modeling and animation for the movie. There are some objects and period car sequences in Paris and Marseilles. The pipeline was built together with Mediawan Kids & Family. We installed a special link to work with their Shotgrid system. There were no excel sheets, because of security reasons. We would prepare material for Sylvain in batches. The dialogues we worked on was not the final version. They re-recorded them in post-production in Paris. The English-language version of the film was recorded in London: There are different accents from London, Oxford and Manchester used to differentiate the regional differences between Paris and Marseille in the movie. The final French version will be screened for the first time in Cannes.

What was the ballpark budget of the movie?

For us, we started at around $16.8 million euros, but we ended up with 15.6 million euros, due to some funds not coming through. Sometimes when you work on animated movies, the budget can be limited, so it’s not easy to deliver the best quality of animation. But this time around, we had the biggest animation work on a feature film to date. We call it a praline, which is a very nice quality chocolate! Everyone was doing their best to just go farther and push the quality even higher.

What do you love about the movie?

I love the fact that it’s a biopic about a famous person. I also have a documentary company and I love to tell powerful stories about strong people. Marcel Pagnol isn’t very well known in Belgium, but he was a successful writer both in theater and in cinema, and the film looks at all the challenging periods in his life. I love the local color and French period details of the movie. When he first came to Paris, he had a hard time making ends meet and tried to survive under a small roof. But he was a very creative and audacious person. The movie also deals with the period when the Second World War was happening and how the German occupation impacted the life of artists in the country. Pagnol made quite an impact with his work and his books are required reads in French schools. It’s also a very emotional story, because it wasn’t always easy for him. Yet, he went on to build a big studio in Marseille — now remember, this was many decades before Netflix and Amazon! I believe he was also the the jury president at the Cannes Film Festival back in 1955! Last year, the Pagnol Museum in Marseille marked the 50th anniversary of his passing.

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A Magnificent Life is written and directed by Sylvain Chomet. It was produced by What The Prod, Mediawan, Bidibul Productions and Walking The Dog. Producers are Ashargin Poire and Valerie Puech for What the Prod; co-producers are Lilian Eche’s Bidibul Productions, Adrian Politowski’s Align and Aton Soumache for Mediawan Kids & Family Cinema, in collaboration with Nicolas Pagnol from Pagnol’s Estate. The French distributor is Wild Bunch. Sony Pictures Classics will distribute the movie in the U.S. in the fourth quarter of this year.