Alain Chabat slipped into the shoes of René Goscinny with great ease. with Walt Disney and met there in particular Morris, the creator of Lucky Luke, before returning to France. When he met Sempé in the Paris of the 1950s, Goscinny was a young man who had already rolled over: he left for Argentina with his parents to escape the Holocaust, he then traveled to the United States, where he dreams of working. While staging the idealized France of the mid-twentieth e century, warm setting of their joint works, this film shows how the two men drew inspiration from their intimate wounds to create the mischievous boy, best friend of generations of readers, whose albums have sold 15 million copies. Read also Cinema: the impulsive return of Little Nicolas

For Jean-Jacques Sempé and René Goscinny, creating The little Nicolas was a way to heal the wounds of a dented childhood. That of a beaten little Bordelais, gone to Paris with his sketches under his arm, or of a globetrotter exiled to escape the Shoah. It also shows under the grain of the paper and the transparency of watercolor the resilient destiny of brilliant creators. Intimate woundsīut this seemingly joyful film does not just tell the carefree life of a young French schoolboy. Between camaraderie, arguments, fights, games, nonsense, and punishments galore, Nicolas lives a childhood full of joys and learning. Leaning over a large white sheet, somewhere between Montmartre and Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Rene Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempé pionately discuss the creation of a character who could live hectic adventures, and thus bear witness to the childhood of its two creators… This laughing and mischievous boy is of course Little Nicolas.

Young nicolas rené goscinny