On the trail of Marsupilami on TMC: why we love the character imagined by Franquin
As Alain Chabat says, “the Marsu represents a certain idea of freedom”.
TMC is taking advantage of Philippe Lacheau’s Marsupilami (which is a hit in theaters) to rebroadcast this Wednesday evening the adaptation by Alain Chabat (already with Jamel Debbouze), released in 2012, Sur la piste du Marsupilami. Première had at the time written a love letter to the comic book character created by Franquin.
It’s not easy to explain this fascination which has lasted for almost 60 years for a yellow creature with black polka dots, which hops around the world with great cries of “houba houba” and other “hop”. We could well draw out Proust’s madeleine syndrome, the reminder of childish wonder; except that we all know that Marsupilami is worth much more than a primary school memory and the smell of a Dupuis album with still fresh boards.
Like the Beatles’ red compilation or a well-crafted Amblin production, Le Marsu cheerfully goes beyond the simple nostalgic observation to become an unalterable pop fetish, with which the dialogue never ceases to take place as we bring out our old Spirou and Fantasio from the attic. Alain Chabathe explains it this way: “The Marsu represents a certain idea of freedom. Other domestic animals in pop culture, say Snowy or Rintintin for example, understand what humans say to them, they comply. Marsu is different. Already you don’t really know if he understands everything, and even if he does, he won’t necessarily do what you ask him to do. He can stop on the way, eat a piranha or stand amazed in front of a flower, while at the same time Spirou, his friend, is in mortal danger.”
The idea holds even more ground as we know thatAndré Franquin conceptualized the animal at the moment when he was starting to get bored by drawing the boards of Spirou and Fantasio, characters that he had not created and for whom he seemed to have only a form of polite disinterest – even if he constantly splashed them with his graphic genius. For its author – and inevitably its readers – Le Marsu is a window towards a more libertarian and fanciful horizon than that, fixed and vaguely reactive, of the juvenile bellhop and the psychorigid journalist.
Countercultural heritage
Crack of representation in movement, Franquin could also give, through his spring-loaded creature, the full measure of his graphic power while combining his never-denied taste for pantomime. No wonder that the undisputed masterpiece of its Spirou and Fantasio period, Le Nid Du Marsupilami, is seen as the reconstruction of a long ethological documentary revolving around the Marsu family, and from which Chabat borrowed entire frames for the most beautiful sequence of his film. This is also why we always come back to Marsupilami: for its hysterical burlesque ease which summons Chuck Jones, Keaton And Harvey Kurtzmanand takes its source from a countercultural heritage repainted by the Belgian humanism of Franquin.
A territory that the designer necessarily shares with Chabat, ex-Nuls converted into a director of children’s films. The person concerned confirms: “All my life I have put Hara Kiri and Walt Disney on the same level. I’m really caught between these two ends, and I have the impression that Franquin was also faced with that. I like his view of the world, which is both gently anarchic and at the same time full of empathy. Gaston Lagaffe is his character who best sums up this state of mind. A vision of the company of terrible darkness and in the middle this gentle anar who is not even there to make the revolution but to make “me finally””.
Alain Chabat: “I feel close to Franquin’s vision of the world”
Call for insurrection
It is then easy to weave the links in this network of signs. Alpha version of Gaston, the Marsupilami could be the key character crystallizing an entire work, which then only tended towards a radicalization of this bittersweet state of mind. Or how to move from Spirou and Fantasio to Gaston, to arrive at the twilight Idées Noires, and this with a form of evidence that is in every way astonishing. A career in three movements, or not far, whose beating heart would be a small animal with an endless tail, a bucolic poet in his spare time, but above all a furious troublemaker trampling on institutions, hierarchies and the usual amenities. Make no mistake, “Houba, Houba” has never been a saccharine rant, or a funny motto. It was a real war cry, a call to insurrection. Now that’s it, we know why, he never gave up on us.
Fred, without Omar, but with his Marsupilami: “He’s a real one, it was very pleasant to work with him!”
