Film

Ernest & Celestine

Name: Ernest & Celestine
Genre: Animation, Family, Crime, Drama, Comedy
Released: 2012
Cast: Anne-Marie Loop, Lambert Wilson, Pauline Brunner, Patrice Melennec, Brigitte Virtudes

A hand-painted French animated fable about a bear and a mouse who become partners in petty crime and, more importantly, in defiance of the rules that say they should hate each other. Gentle, funny, and soft as watercolour, it's built for shared viewing — kids get the caper, adults get the quiet ache about prejudice and found family.

TMDb rating

7.8

If you liked this

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French animation at its most inventive and strange, with the same hand-drawn warmth but a stranger, jazzier, near-wordless sense of humour. If you loved the texture of this world, this is its eccentric cousin.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The King and the Mockingbird1980no page yet

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Another hand-drawn animated fable with flat, painterly visuals and a fierce sense of place, about a child defying the fearful adults around him. The artistry rewards the same slow, attentive kind of watching.

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French-Belgian stop-motion anarchy, gleefully silly and visually inventive, for when you want the same offbeat animated spirit turned up to eleven with none of the tenderness.

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Bonnie and Clyde1967

Same structural idea — an unlikely pair bonding over shared criminality as rebellion — played completely straight, showing what that story looks like with real stakes instead of fairy-tale ones.

Strip away the fur and the whimsy and this is the same engine: two outsiders who fall in together and decide, joyfully at first, to break the law as an act of togetherness against a world that's already rejected them.

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Same emotional core stripped of fantasy — the ache and wonder of connecting with a creature you were never supposed to understand, made real instead of imagined.

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But No animation, no comedy, no plot in the caper sense — it's a slow, meditative nonfiction film about grief and nature.