La prophétie des grenouilles / Raining Cats and Frogs
France / 2003 / 90' 0''
Director: Jacques Rémy-Girerd
Production: Folimage , Studio Canal, France 2 Cinéma, Rhône-Alpes Cinéma
Animation: Zoia Trofimova, Michaël Dudok de Witt, Alain Gagnol, Luis Rego, Jacques Higelin, Romain Bouteille
Screenplay: Jacques-Rémy Girerd, Antoine Lanciaux, Iouri Tcherenkov
Camera: Patrick Talleron
Editing: Hervé Guichard
Music: Serge Besset
Sound: Frédéric Attal
Cast: voices: Michel Piccoli (Ferdinand), Laurentine Milebo (Juliette), Coline Girerd (Lili), Kevin Hervé (Tom), Anouk Grimberg (Želva), Annie Girardot (slonica Denise), Michel Galabru (slon Roger), Jacques Higelin (Lev)
Other: art design: Iouri Tcherenkov, Jean-Loup Felicioli
Synopsis
At the end of the world, on a cozy farm perched at the top of a hill, Tom lives with his loving foster parents: the calm and wise ex-sailor Ferdinand and the high-spirited African Juliette. Their neighbors own a small country zoo and Tom is best friends with their daughter Lili. When her parents go on a short trip, they entrust their daughter and the animals to Tom's family. The children are thrilled, but the frog elder soon warns them that they are in grave danger: the frogs predict 40 days of continuous rain. The wind starts blowing and black clouds start gathering. This is the start of an incredible adventure filled with hardship and misery. Raining Cats and Frogs is a masterpiece that took 6 years to complete: two years writing, 36 months of production - eight to ten seconds of film per day - and one year in post production. The dedicated work of over 200 people is the first feature length film made by the Folimage studio, founded on a meager budget by Jacques-Rémy Girerd and his fellow enthusiasts. Director's note "We could never have imagined we would achieve so much either technically or artistically. Such an ambitious project had not been attempted in France since Paul Grimault's The King and the Bird. We had to reinvent everything. It was a great joy, but I must confess things sometimes got tough [...]. For me, the toughest thing was never to lose the vital thread of the plot, to retain its initial freshness and always stay at a safe distance from the film so as to remain clear-sighted." Jacques-Rémy Girerd
