Zarafa

At a time when emi­gra­tion and domes­tic reset­tling are hot-but­ton polit­i­cal top­ics once more, a sweet, ani­mat­ed hold-over from 2012 pops up its head above the para­pet to have its say. Rémi Bezançon and Jean-Christophe Lie’s Zarafa tells of a young slave boy who breaks free from his bonds and man­ages to escape to Paris with his best pal – a giraffe who gives the film its title – via hot air bal­loon. The episod­ic depic­tion of his vital for­ma­tive years is nar­rat­ed to a group of besot­ted pre-teens by a vil­lage elder, and takes in tus­sles with wild ani­mals and slave traders, plus a brac­ing les­son in the vio­lent prop­er­ties of hip­popota­mus bow­el movements.

The film is influ­enced by the tra­di­tions of Michel Ocelot’s (supe­ri­or) Kirik­ou films, as well as many of the ​’90s Dis­ney pic­tures, which Lie worked on in the ani­ma­tion depart­ment. Not only does this film sit visu­al­ly between those two worlds, but it mix­es a sen­si­bil­i­ty of mat­ter-of-fact vio­lence with some­thing that verges on trite sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. The lat­ter specif­i­cal­ly comes into play when the film­mak­ers decide to punc­ture through real­i­ty by anthro­po­mor­phis­ing the ani­mals, mak­ing the cows weep at lost com­padres, and even hav­ing the now in cap­tiv­i­ty Zarafa talk­ing to her young charge, Maki.

Though the sto­ry is framed as a moral tale about the pow­er of friend­ship and iden­ti­ty, there’s some­thing a lit­tle bemus­ing about the fact Maki, upon arriv­ing in Paris, is again straight away sold into slav­ery and takes great pains to try and return back home again. Yet this immi­gra­tion sto­ry is told from his per­spec­tive, and there’s no sug­ges­tion that he’s unwant­ed in the French cap­i­tal, just that he moves from one hard­ship to the next. The film sup­ports the idea that peo­ple should have a choice where they reside and be hap­py with the social sys­tem they enter into.