Season 1 • Episode 13
LatestThe Insensitive Princess is a 1983 French animated television series written and directed by Michel Ocelot. The animation is a combination of cel and cutout animation while the elaborate architectural style of the production design has been said to be reminiscent, though visual association, of Charles Perrault and Jean de La Fontaine's fairy tales; like Ocelot's Les Trois Inventeurs before it and several episodes of the later Ciné si it takes place in a literary fairy tale-like fantasy setting, specifically a palatial theater, which mixes the ornate styles of decoration and dress of the upper-classes of both the time of the Ancien Régime and the belle époque and includes such fanciful technology as a baroque-styled submarine, elements of outright fantasy such as dragons and such anachronisms as a reference to motorcycles. It won first prize in its category at the 3rd Bourg-en-Bresse Animation Festival for Youth and the audience prize at the 6th Odense Film Festival.
Production
Ancien Régime meets belle époque in maximalist set design.
Direction
Ocelot's cutout mastery creates living storybook tableaux.
Costume
Ornate dress that screams 'I have a submarine and no empathy.'
Creator
Michel Ocelot
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Ocelot created this between his two most famous works, Les Trois Inventeurs and Ciné si, essentially incubating the visual style that would define his later Kirikou films.
The anachronistic motorcycle reference in a baroque fantasy wasn't a mistake—it was Ocelot's early signature of collapsing historical time, a technique he'd perfect in Princes et Princesses decades later.
FR
