LUCIDMEDIA

Around Da Way with the makers of Les Lascars

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Tuesday, 28 July 2009 08:24

It’s Saturday afternoon, and music drifts up to the fourth floor window of the Fantasia media office from the street festival on Rue St. Catherine below. Emmanuel Klotz and IZM have just returned from getting a sandwich and are now getting their picture taken for posterity as two of this year’s visiting filmmakers to Fantasia. They’re part of the crew of the French animated film Les Lascars; Klotz is co-director and co-screenwriter and IZM also co-wrote the script and voiced one of the main characters.

Les Lascars began as a simple project started by a group of friends acquainted through the Parisian hip-hop culture. Several of them attended the renowned Gobelins animation school and they decided to combine their efforts to create a series of one-minute shorts centred around their experiences in the ghettos of Paris. “It’s a cartoon, but it’s not cartoonish,” explains IZM, saying that the universe of Les Lascars looks exaggerated, but it sounds real. “The dialogue is real; we wanted people in the hood in France to know that it’s real.”

The series started running in 1998 and was picked up by Canal Plus in France. It was instantly popular and later became an internet sensation. It’s aired in over 20 countries and has been translated into numerous languages. In the US it aired on MTV 2 as “Round Da Way,” and was popular enough that the cable channel ordered a second season. Needless to say the success came as a tremendous surprise to IZM.

“It touched more people than what we saw,” he says. “Humour is international […] when we saw the reaction from the audience at Fantasia, it was like okay, maybe we can talk to more people than what we thought.”

Even more so given the personal nature of the stories, which IZM says were 99 per cent true for the first season but have since evolved because “Real life is not that funny.”

“We just did what we wanted to see, it was selfish,” he says with a devilish grin. “In hip-hop the anthem is peace, unity, love and having fun, and that’s what we’re about. […]For us, just doing Lascars was a militant act.”

The intention was to always get to the stage of making a feature. “That’s what we wanted to do in the beginning, but it was just a dream since lately,” says IZM. The project seemed to start coming together four years ago when Klotz and Albert Pereira-Lazaro came onboard as co-directors. The film itself is not a sequel to the series, but a new story with new characters in the same universe. “[We] took the elements people like and built a new family of characters and put them in that world.”

The budget for Les Lascars was relatively small as compared to big American animated films like Up or Ice Age; the total cost was about 6 million Euros or just over $9 million Canadian. So nobody was involved for the money, says IZM, but the project still attracted some big name voice talent like Vincent Cassel (Ocean’s 12 & 13, Eastern Promises) and Diane Kruger (National Treasure, Inglourious Basterds). “We got good casting for France, and all those people made it with heart,” adds IZM.

Despite the support though, Les Lascars still faced the same stigmata that animation does in North America: it’s kid’s stuff. Like other filmmakers playing in the animation medium, he hopes that this film can prove otherwise. “That’s why we hope that people in France can say ‘Hey, this can work. It’s a great medium.’”

A great medium that can be costly, which is why the production was meticulously planned before any actual animating began. The process was open says IZM, “The only rule was the best idea wins, that was the law.” Voice recording was matched to animatics so that the story and jokes were timed right before a single cell was painted. A combination of 2-D and 3-D animation was used to cut costs, but IZM and Klotz say that it made them more creative.

The final touch, for audiences abroad anyway, was to give the film English subtitles. “In Lascars what is working is the realness of the dialogue and real French slang,” explains IZM. “So for the American version we wanted to do the same. I speak English, but I don’t know all the little slang right now.”

IZM worked with an “American slang coach,” for lack of a better term, to make sure that the dialogue read in the subtitles sounded right to an American audience. “That’s why you need two brains to do that,” he says. “You really need to understand the French and everything underneath the dialogue, then you need real actual slang that works.”

Fantasia was the world premiere of Les Lascars, and bringing the film to Montreal was a logical first step, says IZM. “It’s not the same culture but we have some things in common. […] It makes sense because it’s urban, it’s hip-hop, it’s animation, and it makes sense to first come to Canada because it’s French.”