As with most operas, the story was never the primary selling point of “Carmen,” so to adapt it with the music heavily downplayed in favor of the narrative is an audacious move; refashioning this tale of murderous, hot-blooded amour fou as a children’s film, doubly so. But Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera has always been an versatile text on film, withstanding interpretations ranging from Jean-Luc Godard’s postmodern “First Name: Carmen” to the South African township musical “uCarmen-eKhayelitsha” to a Beyoncé-starring “hip-hopera.” So the French animated feature “Viva Carmen” follows in a proud, elastic tradition — and if Sébastien Laudenbach’s film isn’t the hottest “Carmen” ever to hit the screen, it’s certainly the most blazingly bright.
A veritable triumph of movement, design and, above all, color, “Viva Carmen” is a film for any fanciful children (or former children) inclined to memorize the names of every Crayola shade in the box, and to make up others besides. For no existing term feels entirely suitable for certain intensely burnt hues of apricot, magenta and aubergine that Laudenbach (in collaboration with graphic designer Cyril Pedrosa) liberally splashes across the screen here. With a palette selected to evoke the high temperatures and high passions of 19th-century Andalusia, and fluidly shifting as the action moves from day to night, from searing sun to blessed shade, this is the most extravagantly painterly animated feature in recent memory, thanks also to Laudenbach’s distinctively minimalist, bold-brushstroke line work and character design — immediately recognizable to anybody who saw his 2023 breakout film “Chicken for Linda!”
That film, co-directed with his partner Chiara Malta, connected with audiences as much for the gentle, community-minded warmth of its mother-daughter tale as for its strikingly color-blocked visuals. Though it filters Bizet’s original tragedy through a child’s-eye perspective — taking as its jumping-off point the youthful chorus that opens the opera — “Viva Carmen” is a less emotionally affecting work, but its sensory dazzle is its selling point: Not just gorgeous on a frame-by-frame basis, the film’s swooping, kinetic rhythm gives it the sense of being invisibly, spontaneously drawn before our eyes. Following festival dates at Cannes and Annecy, it should at least match the global profile of its predecessor, which was distributed Stateside by GKIDS.
Building on a concept devised by the director and producer Pierre-Henri Léon, Santiago Otheguy’s script plays fast and loose with Bizet’s opera and the Prosper Mérimée novella that inspired it — to the point of inventing an entirely new protagonist. That would be Salvador (voiced by young “Anatomy of a Fall” star Milo Machado-Graner), a teenage orphan living by his wits on the mean streets of 19th-century Seville, under the tutelage of Antonio (Paul Minthe), a blind knife-sharpener with an eerie knack for catching visions of the future in his gleaming blades. When Salvador encounters the seductive, wild-spirited Romani woman Carmen (Camélia Jordana), he is, like many of the city’s older menfolk, entranced; when Antonio’s blades foretell her death at the hands of her lover, the dashing soldier José (Carl Malapa), Salvador enlists the help of fellow urchin Belén (Soumaye Bocoum) to disrupt destiny.
It’s an ostensibly feminist reframing of the original story that might not altogether rescue Carmen from violent patriarchal impulse, but instead makes Belén something of a community leader — ending not with a grim crime of passion, but a call for solidarity among women and other disenfranchised groups. Salvador remains an odd choice of character to place at the center of this all, notwithstanding Machado-Graner’s winning voice work; the film’s focus occasionally feels a degree or two removed from what it’s really about, caught between the adult melodrama of the source and the plucky childhood adventure bracketing it. (Some young viewers might be a little perplexed by the former, though “Viva Carmen” does itself thoughtfully portray the reality of children absorbing the grownup world at their own pace.)
Any lapses in attention or understanding, however, should be covered by the sheer enchantment of the animation, immersing viewers in the chaotic bustle and unyielding climate of this scorched city with stark ribbons of ink and those saturated pools of Gauguin-esque color. The score by Amine Bouhafa and Isabelle Laudenbach — the director’s sister, and also an accomplished flamenco guitarist — deftly interpolates scraps and strains of Bizet’s original compositions, stripped of operatic excess and given a folky lilt. “Viva Carmen” makes the barest of concessions to purists, but doesn’t strain for modernity either, pursuing instead a kind of handmade storybook wonder.
