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His fourth animated feature film
His first Kirikou et la sorcière (1998) was a great
success (Kirikou effect in France)
Azur et Asmar also set partly in Africa
Focus on “transnational cinema”
“as scores of transnational films have
illustrated in various generic modes, leaving
one’s homeland entails leaving behind both
physically and emotionally the familiarity that
home implies. This leave-taking often entails,
to use Freud’s term, a becoming-unheimlich
both to oneself and to those who are variously
invested in the diasporic subject’s remaining
recognizable.” (Ezra & Rowden, Transnational
Cinema in the Film Reader)
“… borders are always leaky and there is a
considerable degree of movement across them ….
It is in this migration, this border crossing, that the
transnational emerges. … The experience of border
crossing takes place at two broad levels. First there
is the level of production and the activities of filmmakers. … The second way in which cinema
operates on a transnational basis is in terms of the
distribution and reception of films. … when films
do travel, there is no certainty that audiences will
receive them in the same way in different cultural
contexts” (Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of
National Cinema”)
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Focus in Africa again, which embarks on a
transcendence of all types of boundaries, a
perpetual translation or transportation between
the two cultures, the Orient and the Occident,
thus promoting a mutual complementarity
contact between its viewers, mostly children in
the West, and a different culture
awareness of the position of the immigrant in
contemporary societies
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Hostility toward immigrants in general in the
Western, developed world, and toward those
of Arab origin in particular, (‘invasion’ of
immigrants in the continent).
Borders are of paramount importance in
relation to immigrants who are excluded from
a process of opening up, or even completely
eliminating, all forms of boundaries when
capital and the larger economy are concerned.
‘[…] such a dual-policy regime [is] viable when
it comes to access to the EU: on the one hand,
lifting multiple restrictions on access by nonEU firms, investment capital and goods in the
context of WTO, and the general opening of
financial markets in the European economies,
and on the other, building a Fortress Europe
when it comes to immigrants and refugees’
(Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens)
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New immigration bill adopted in France in
2006 (DNA tests, French language tests, other
biometric tests)
these provisions ‘[are] part of the general strategy
and managerial logic based on the rationalization of
processes and procedures, leading to the
fundamental transformation of a conception of
society once based on mutual trust into a situation of
generalized suspicion’ (Merzouki,
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number4.20/dnafrench-immigration-law).
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Ocelot’s film attempts a reversal of roles.
The film inhabits Arab culture, embarks on a
series of boundary crossings – literal and
metaphorical
Finally manages a reversal of roles, turning the
Self into the Other
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transferences between cultures – be it the
physical trans-portations of individuals, spatial
or temporal dis-placements, alternations
between languages
‘in-between’ space that undermines
contemporary fixities
“By drawing on more than one culture, more than
one language, more than one world experience,
within the confines of the same text, postcolonial
Anglophone and Francophone literature very often
defies our notions of an ‘original’ work and its
translation. Hence, in many ways these
plurilingual texts in their own right resist and
ultimately exclude the monolingual and demand
of their readers to be like themselves: ‘in between’,
at once capable of reading and translating, where
translation becomes an integral part of the reading
experience” (Samia Mehrez “Translation and the
Postcolonial Experience: The Francophone North
African Text”)
“authors” of French origin, like Michel Ocelot,
who were born and grew up in Africa, are also
positioned in this space of “in between”, of not
belonging, which makes them “[assume] their
bilingualism as an effective means with which
to contest all forms of domination, and all
kinds of exclusion within their own ‘native’
cultures and their ‘host’ cultures as well”
(Mehrez).
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Born and grew up in North Africa
identifies himself with the North African
immigrant in France and hints at the
frustration he experienced as an adolescent
because of his ‘immigrant’ status when he was
transported from Africa to France (“I was a
small hostile Beur, with an absurd attitude. I
invented a country that never existed, a
country on cardboard, instead of living the
here and now”).
“Beur is the term used to refer to a person born in
France of North African immigrant parents. It is
not a racist term and is often used by the media,
anti-racist groups and second-generation North
Africans themselves. The word itself originally
came from the ‘verlan’ rendering of the word
‘arabe’” (Le Robert & Collins Dictionnaire
Français-Anglais), where “verlan”, in the same
dictionary, is “a particular kind of backsland […]
[which] consists of inverting the syllables of
words, and often then truncating the result to
make a new word”.
“border filmmaking tends to be accented by the
‘strategy of translation rather than representation’
(Hicks 1991, xxiii). Such a strategy undermines the
distinction between autochthonous and alien
cultures in the interest of promoting their
interaction and intertextuality. As a result, the best
of the border films are hybridized and
experimental – characterized by multifocality,
multilinguality, asynchronicity, critical distance,
fragmented or multiple subjectivity, and
transborder amphibolic characters – characters
who might best be called ‘shifters’” (Naficy
“Situating Accented Cinema”).
Two boys spend their first years together, since
Asmar’s mother is Azur’s wet-nurse and later his
nanny. This mother-figure, a literally life-giving
force for Azur who has never known his real
mother, brings the two boys up with oral narratives
from her homeland, in particular the tale of the
Djinn Fairy who awaits the brave prince to
overcome all obstacles and finally deliver her from
an evil spell that keeps her imprisoned. The two
boys, although later separated, are at some point
reunited and set off together to achieve the
liberation of the Djinn Fairy.
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Setting
Dual displacement (temporal and spatial)
Disorientation of this “in-between” or
“beyond” state, neither here nor there, or both
here and there at the same time “an
exploratory, restless movement caught so well
in the French rendition of the words au-delà –
here and there, on all sides, fort/da, hither and
thither, back and forth” (Homi Bhabha The
Location of Culture).
The Middle Ages, largely associated with a
period of darkness for Western humanity, refer
to a mediating period between the classical
civilization of Antiquity and Modern times.
The countries of the Maghreb, or Barbary
Largely cast in the role of the enemy
“The religion of its inhabitants alone was enough to
exclude it from Christian Europe. The ambiguity of its
position thus appears: part of the known world but
irremediably alien, part of both Africa, the Mediterranean
and the Islamic worlds. Hence the difficulty of deciding
where to classify it, for each of these accepted divisions of
the globe entailed a certain number of characteristics in
the European imagination, which North Africa did not fit
perfectly” (Ann Thomson Barbary and Enlightenment)
Barbary: “a word which is overlaid with adverse
connotations in European minds that it must immediately
have provoked hostile reactions among most people”.
“when an original culture is superimposed with a
colonial or dominant culture through education, it
produces a nervous condition of ambivalence,
uncertainty, a blurring of cultural boundaries, inside
and outside, a nervousness within” (Robert Young)
Example: Poisoned by Saracen’s venom
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Azur (sky-blue French)
Curse of blue eyes
Motherless
Wealth-poverty
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Asmar (dark Arabic)
Curse of dark skin
Fatherless
Poverty-wealth
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Dominant position in the film
Focal point in the opening sequence
Breast-feeding (children’s nourishment)
Children’s acquisition of speech
Oral tradition
“Only when we have considered the whole scope
of the basic feminine functions – the giving of life,
nourishment, warmth, and protection – can we
understand why the Feminine occupies so central a
position in human symbolism and from the very
beginning bears the character of ‘greatness’”
(Neumann The Great Mother).
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Primary
Open
Soft
Good
Other
Unity
Orient
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Secondary
Closed
Hard
Evil
Self
Division
Occident
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Crossing of the sea
Africa
Utopia
Blindness
Difference
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Divesting of previous identity
Angel – Demon
Angelic eyes – Evil eye
Self – Other
Native – Immigrant/Alien/Unwanted
Sight – Blindness
Wealth – Poverty
Speech – Silence
Familiar land – Unknown territory
 Bright – Dull
 Childhood stories – Frightful reality
 Beauty – Ugliness
Example: Meeting between Azur and Asmar
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‫‪1st merchant (addressing Azur):‬‬
‫أنظر ماذا فعلت؟‬
‫)‪Azur: (Gives the merchant the money he earned from begging‬‬
‫!عفوا ً أنا آسف‬
‫)‪1st merchant: (takes the money‬‬
‫ماذا تريدني أن أفعل بهذا؟ ماذا فعلت لربي كي أقع على صعلوق كهذا؟‬
‫‪2nd merchant:‬‬
‫!المسكين! لم يقصده‬
‫‪1st merchant:‬‬
‫!لم يقصده؟ هؤالء الغرباء بدؤا أن يضايقوننا‬
‫‪2nd merchant:‬‬
‫)‪ (Says something in a different language‬وماذا عنك أنت؟ ألست غريباً؟‬
‫‪1st merchant:‬‬
‫!تكلم بالعربية و ليس بالقبائلية‬
‫‪‬‬
1st merchant: “You miserable imbecile! Look what
you’ve done!”
Azur: “I’m sorry.”
1st merchant: “What do you want me to do with that?
What have I done to good god to fall on such a
cretin!”
2nd merchant: “He didn’t do it on purpose.”
1st merchant: “Not on purpose? They have started to
annoy us, these foreigners!”
2nd merchant: “And you, you’re not a foreigner? (In
Kabyle) Here, it is our home.”
1st merchant: “Speak Arabic, not Kabyle!”’
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Deliberate absence of translation
Gaps in understanding
Sharing of alienation with main character
Position of immigrant
Exclusion
“Translation becomes part of the process of
domination, of achieving control, a violence carried
out on the language, culture, and people being
translated. The close links between colonization and
translation begin not with acts of exchange, but of
violence and appropriation, of ‘deterritorialization’”
(Young). See Niranjana.
‘[…] The only drawback to this movie is that part of the
conversation that is made in Arabic has no subtitle (fyi
language used in the movie is French and Arabic but it
has English subtitle).’
http://mettysays.blogspot.com/search?updatedmin=2007-0101T00%3A00%3A00%2B07%3A00&updatedmax=2008-0101T00%3A00%3A00%2B07%3A00&max-results=34 ;
‘The story was presented in French and Arabic and I
found it a shame that they didn’t give subtitle for the
Arabic dialogue’
http://whiteka.blogspot.com/2007_09_01_archive.html).
Knowledge
 Inside/Outside
 Mediation
 No boundaries
 Power of the disempowered
Example: Jénane / Princess Chamsous-Sabah
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Myth
 Utopia (all characters displaced/misfits)
End of Film
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“the Other text is forever the exegetical horizon of difference,
never the active agent of articulation. The Other is cited, quoted,
framed, illuminated, encased in the short/reverse-shot strategy of a
serial enlightenment. Narrative and the cultural politics of
difference become the closed circle of interpretation. The Other
loses its power to signify, to negate, to initiate its historic desire, to
establish its own institutional and oppositional discourse. However
impeccably the content of an ‘other’ culture may be known,
however anti-ehtnocentrically it is represented, it is its location as
the closure of grand theories, the demand that, in analytic terms, it
be always the good object of knowledge, the docile body of
difference, that reproduces a relation of domination and is the
most serious indictment of the institutional powers of critical
theory” (Bhabha)
“If we must translate in order to emancipate and preserve
cultural parts and to build linguistic bridges for present
understandings and future thought, we must do so while
attempting to respond ethically to each language’s contexts,
intertexts, and intrinsic alterity. This dual responsibility may
well describe an ethics of translation or, more modestly, the
ethical at work in translation. […] Indeed, without more
refined and sensitive cultural/linguistic translations and,
above all, without an education that draws attention to the
very act of translation and to the interwoven, problematic
otherness that it confronts, our global world will be less
hospitable; in fact, it could founder” (Bermann, Nation,
Language and the Ethics of Translation)