A French Animated Superhero in Cannes: On Louis Clichy’s Iron Boy

While serving on the FIPRESCI jury at Cannes, French critic Thierry Méranger discovered an admirable celebration of the current artistic vitality of animation, even as the future of French animated cinema appears increasingly uncertain.

The importance attached to animation was undoubtedly one of the defining features of the 79th Cannes Film Festival. With the notable exception of the Official Competition, every section screened at least one animated feature, and it is clear that, among the ten films presented, most won over their audiences. These ranged from Sébastien Laudenbach’s Carmen, l’oiseau rebelle (Directors’ Fortnight) to Phuong Mai Nguyen’s In Waves (Critics’ Week), including Dimitri Planchon and Jean-Paul Guigue’s remarkable Blaise (ACID) and the mind-bending Jim Queen by Nicolas Athané and Marco Nguyen (Midnight Screenings). Not to mention the unexpected, gag-filled, and spectacular Vertiginous (Le Vertige) by Quentin Dupieux (Directors’ Fortnight).

The fact that most of these features—with the sole exception of Leah Nelson’s beautiful Tangles (Special Screenings)—were at least co-produced by a French company (as was We Are Aliens, by Japanese director Kadowaki Kohei, also screened in Directors’ Fortnight) speaks volumes about the current artistic vitality of animated filmmaking in the homeland of Michel Ocelot and Jean-François Laguionie.

Many observers have noted that this artistic success masks growing concerns about the future of the sector. The French animation ecosystem now appears increasingly vulnerable, threatened both by the rise of artificial intelligence and by mounting pressures on public broadcasters, traditionally among the most important financiers of French animation. In this context, Cannes resonated like a magnificent swan song.

One of the most acclaimed animated films on the Croisette was undoubtedly Iron Boy (Le Corset), screened in the Un Certain Regard section. Louis Clichy, its director and a graduate of the prestigious Gobelins school in Paris, is no newcomer. He worked as an animator at Pixar on WALL·E and Up before co-directing, alongside Alexandre Astier, the CGI features Asterix: The Mansions of the Gods (2014) and Asterix: The Secret of the Magic Potion (2018).

In this sense, Iron Boy marks a far more personal project and a return to the visual sensibility that first distinguished the filmmaker. His earliest notable work was a 2003 music video for Édith Piaf and Théo Sarapo’s song À quoi ça sert l’amour (What Is Love For?), whose black outlines on a white background emphasised brushstrokes and sketch-like spontaneity. The connection between that early work and the feature film presented in Cannes is both artistic and thematic.

What immediately strikes the viewer in Iron Boy, beyond its hand-drawn aesthetic based largely on two-dimensional animation and watercolour textures, is the intimate nature of a project whose narrative source feels deeply autobiographical. Set in 1980s France, the film follows Christophe, an eleven-year-old boy growing up in a farming family in the Beauce region.

The narrative contains all the hallmarks of a classic coming-of-age story: a young protagonist caught between childhood and adolescence, confronting family tensions, discovering first love, and finding his way into music. Yet the film’s true subject lies elsewhere.

Its international title derives from the story of a boy constrained by an orthopaedic brace, set against the backdrop of a rural landscape undergoing profound transformation. While the weakness of Christophe’s spine threatens the collapse of his body, the film simultaneously portrays an agricultural world in crisis, where traditional economic models are rapidly disappearing.

From the subtle superimposition of these two narrative strands emerges Clichy’s most compelling visual idea. Deeply attached to the region of his childhood, he masterfully contrasts the horizontal flatness of the Beauce plains with the soaring verticality of Chartres Cathedral, whose organ plays a decisive role in Christophe’s musical awakening.

Beyond its celebration of the landscape—magnified, though never idealised, through the combination of Indian ink lines and the translucent hues of watercolour—the film transforms disability into an opportunity to perceive the world differently. The moment Christophe removes his brace becomes not simply a physical liberation but an entry into another dimension.

As the world begins to waver and reshape itself according to his gaze, everyday reality gives way to fantasy. Christophe symbolically becomes a superhero from a parallel universe, and the film occasionally ventures into the realm of magical realism. This recalls another notable French animated feature, the beautiful Phantom Boy (2015) by Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol, in which a hospitalised boy discovers extraordinary powers. In both cases, animation transforms ordinary experience into something wondrous.

Yet the most moving aspect of Iron Boy remains its portrayal of Christophe’s relationship with his family, particularly with his father. It is outside the fantasy sequences that the film achieves its greatest emotional subtlety, capturing a father-son relationship built from silences, misunderstandings, and awkward expressions of affection.

Juxtaposing the timeless grandeur of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem with the easy-listening French pop of the 1980s, Clichy also offers several unexpected and deeply affecting renditions of Ouragan, the song famously performed by Princess Stéphanie of Monaco. This is by no means the least of his accomplishments.

Thierry Méranger
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2026