After its birth on Instagram in 2020, it was almost natural that the animated series Samuelbroadcast on arte.tv since March, has enjoyed success online. But the result was beyond all expectations. After 40 million videos viewed on the various platforms where the Franco-German channel is present, and 50,000 videos on TikTok inspired by the series, Arte broadcasts it at 8:50 p.m. every evening. A deserved success for this funny and sensitive immersion in the life, both simple and complicated, of a young pre-teen.
Samuel is 10 years old and has a lot of problems. He doesn’t like Sundays, visiting castles and his mother’s beef with carrots. He is angry with his comrade Basil for having revealed to Julie his secret love for her. And he hates Bérénice, the pest of his class, who loves him…
Everything here is fictitious but the accents of this series are so realistic that we sometimes believe we are finding the child we were at the same age. Because it is the inner voice of this CM2 schoolboy that we hear in this series imagined by Émilie Tronche, a young talent in French animation. At the start of each episode, Samuel reveals his moods in his diary: the little things and the great injustices of a child’s daily life, the arguments of his parents and his fear of seeing them divorce, the budding love and the death of a grandmother…
Deadpan humor and extremely refined graphics
These first emotions are staged with perfect simplicity and extremely refined black and white graphics, which contrast with deadpan humor and animation attentive to the gestures and gazes of the children. Émilie Tronche’s ability to create strong characters in a few strokes and in a very short format, four minutes, hits the mark.
The designer put a lot of herself into Samuel. This 10-year-old child who grew up in 2006 with the beginnings of the Internet and sweet words exchanged on instant messaging, that’s her. She even lends her androgynous timbre to all the characters’ voices. A series with a free and refreshing tone, peppered with choreography that is both burlesque and graceful, which can be watched with young adolescents, if they have not discovered it for themselves. The young filmmaker also tested it on CM2 students, who were thrilled, “both moved and dying of laughter”. That’s a good summary.