The Painting

Le Tableau is a rather clever pastiche of Romeo and Juliet and The Wizard of Oz. It’s also a palimpsest, rich in content and meaning below the surface. Star-crossed lovers Ramo (Adrien Larmande) and Claire (Chloé Berthier), must hide their romance, not because of their surnames, but as a result of differences in class and religion.

We've seen this a million times before, but never as in this animated film co-written and directed by Jean-François Laguionie. Ramo and Claire are figures in an incomplete painting; he belongs to the aristocratic Toupins (tout peint, or 'fully drawn'), who live in the palace, and she to the stigmatized Pafinis (Pas fini, or 'not finished'), who occupy the garden (there are also the Reufs, exiled in the "Cursed Forest" with its "Flowers of Death").

The Pafinis await the return — the Second Coming, so to speak — of the Painter (appropriately performed, in voice and body, by Laguionie himself, who personally designed each of the characters), so he can finish them.

The Toupins, agitated by the Great Chandelier (Jacques Roehrich), believe that the Painter will not return because his work is already done (“And if he made us, the Toupins, the only perfectly drawn beings in his works, it is because such was his intention"). As for the Reufs, "it is said that they believe in nothing."

The love story is, counterintuitively, the weakest aspect of the plot — in particular plain and tall Claire, designed in Amedeo Modigliani's elongated style; fortunately, the true heroine is Lola (Jessica Monceau), who has the physiognomy and the self-assurance of a young Salma Hayek.

She takes on the role of Dorothy alongside the Lion, Scarecrow, and Tin Man who are Ramo, Plume (Thierry Jahn) — a Reuf whose friend was turned into abstract art under the Toupins' boots —, and Magenta (Thomas Sagols), a soldier from another painting.

The foursome literally walk through the fourth wall, leaving their paintings to visit the apparently abandoned stud...