Linda is unfairly punished when her mother wrongly accuses her of stealing her ring to exchange it for a friend’s new hat. When the mother discovers that the jewel was instead swallowed by the cat, she is ready to do anything to make amends. In exchange for her forgiveness, Linda asks her mother to cook chicken with peppers, the favorite recipe of her father, who died years earlier.
The undertaking, however, turns out to be more complex than expected. While an indefinite general strike keeps all the city’s stores under lock and key, finding a simple chicken takes on the appearance of a race against time, in which a farmer, police officers and all the neighborhood children will be involved.
With Linda wants chicken! — winner of the Cristal of the Annecy Animated Film Festival and the César for best animated film —, filmmakers Sébastien Laudenbach (The girl without hands2016) and Chiara Malta (Simple Women2019) brilliantly exploit the potential of the child’s imagination to transform a seemingly banal event into a vibrant and vibrant story, which appeals to both the senses and the emotions.
As funny as it is sensitive, the script by the two co-directors intelligently explores the questions of mourning, the fragility of memories, mother-daughter relationships, friendship and solidarity without their story losing a single ounce of dynamism.
Directed by two maestros of rhythm and composition, the feature film uses the codes of the action film to multiply the twists and turns and strong emotions. Everything is judiciously interspersed with singing sequences, borrowed from the musical, which infuses the work with great poetry.
If it is tasty on a narrative level, the film is absolutely dazzling from a formal and visual point of view. Sébastien Laudenbach sketched expressive and playful characters, to which he associated colors. Linda is yellow and her mother is orange, her aunt is pink, the police officers are blue and her best friend is in shades of green; a rainbow with which filmmakers create nothing less than magic.
Thus, when these characters deploy in the city in order to get their hands on the famous chicken, they take the form of glows of color which dance, twirl, cross each other, pursue each other, as a symbol of both singularity and strength in numbers. A scene, in which all the children try to make the chicken fall from a tree, by throwing sweaters, hats and accessories between the branches, is memorable.
With this incredible adventure story that will entertain children as much as their parents, Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach celebrate the playfulness, determination and thoughtfulness of childhood, recalling in passing the importance of listening to those who, a simple wish, have the power to bring people together and create a community.