Robert Benayoun’s reverence for the uncrowned king of slapstick and unfettered silliness has maybe something to do with his own affinity to surrealism, which he joined in the forties and encouraged him to deal with the great masters of the absurd comedy like the Marx Brothers and Buster Keaton. In six episodes Benayoun, who worked for many years as a film critic in Paris, immerses himself in the various aspects of the personality and comedian. He was allowed to use the inexhaustible supply of unused or private films, since Lewis was known for not throwing away one inch of celluloid and hoarding it in his basement. In addition to the interviews, in which renowned colleagues of Mel Brooks from Scorsese to John Landis and Lewis himself speak, there are especially these rare and sometimes startling images, that give a new sharper view on Lewis as a filmmaker and as a person.
The 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.
A six-part French tv series first broadcast in 1979, each episode of Orient Express focuses on a different tale of a journey on the legendary train; each one is set between the outbreak of the First World War and the outbreak of the Second.