Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticEvery time someone takes a comicbook character the world adores and decides to make an animated movie, there’s a risk they won’t do justice to the original designs. “The Adventures of Tintin” comes immediately to mind, since Spielberg and company made the bold choice of swapping artist Hergé’s appealing clean-line designs with appalling performance-capture zombies.
Or 2019’s disappointing “The Addams Family” reboot, which effectively turned Charles Addams’ macabre sketches into benign, generic-looking balloon animals.It’s a problem the folks at ON Entertainment take seriously.
They’re the ones who translated Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “The Little Prince” to the screen, erring on the side of overdoing the CG equivalent in that case.
Now, the same studio has done right by Jean-Jacques Sempé and René Goscinny’s Petit Nicolas — or Little Nicholas to English speakers, who are almost certainly less familiar with the source material (essentially France’s answer to Dennis the Menace) and probably not as picky when it comes to how the character is treated.
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