Feature-length animation has largely become a merciless and exacting thing, every frame invested with such a fortune’s worth of pre-determined purpose that there often isn’t any room left over for the audience to move around the images for themselves. These films used to implore our imaginations to fill the space between each cel, but the ones they make now are as seamless and inviting as the blades of a helicopter — watch from a safe distance, keep your hands to yourself, and try to enjoy the ride.
And then are the films of French animator Sébastien Laudenbach, whose expressionistic linework is so colorful and free that his characters look more like aura readings than people, and whose stories — even the darker ones — betray none of the burden that was required to bring them to life. His 2023 gem “Chicken for Linda!,” for example, was a modern-day musical adventure about a girl named Linda who really wants chicken for dinner. It rules.
A swooning and sketch-like distillation of Georges Bizet’s “Carmen,” Laudenbach’s new feature obviously takes on a slightly heavier subject than his previous work (including his 2016 debut “The Girl Without Hands,” which is about a girl without hands), but it retains the same blitheness of spirit. Like the director’s earlier films, it would almost seem to have been made on a whim if not for how self-possessed it feels in the telling, just as its characters — their thick black outlines filled with ever-changing swatches of color — would threaten to blend into the backgrounds if not for how clearly Laudenbach defines their feelings.
And the feelings are naturally intense in “Viva Carmen,” which shrinks Bizet’s opera down to a bite-sized snack that (older) kids should be able to follow and enjoy. The French-language film begins in Spain circa 1820, when Antonio, the blind knife-sharpener, returns to Seville to the great delight of local brigands and soldiers, whose blades have grown dull in his absence. He arrives with his sensitive tween apprentice Salvador (voiced by “Anatomy of a Fall” breakout Milo Machado-Graner) in tow, the boy coming home for the first time since he was a child. He doesn’t remember Carmen (voiced by Camélia Jordana), the beautiful Romani woman whose green eyes he spots in the darkness by a river one night, but perhaps he wasn’t so attuned to such things when he was a child.
Alas, whatever crush Salvatore may or may not be harboring for Carmen is soon eclipsed by a more urgent impulse, as Antonio — who can see the future of a knife as he sharpens it — discovers that a strapping young soldier named José will eventually stab Carmen with his dagger, a fate that his naive assistant inevitably sets into motion by trying to prevent it. And why not? José had never even met Carmen when the prophecy was foretold. But love is the only force more powerful than death, and woe to those who get in its way.
Like much of the story in this movie, the coup de foudre that sparks between Carmen and José is condensed to a degree that makes Bizet’s opera feel positively nuanced in its depiction of lust, but the speed at which things develop here — soundtracked by the jaunty clatter of castanets — reflects the velocity of the emotions at work, as well as the difficulty of holding onto hope in a world that feels like it’s careening towards disaster. Laudenbach and co-writer Santiago Otheguy also recognize that kids only have so much time for romance, and rewardingly choose to divert a large portion of the movie’s attention to a character named Belén instead, a street-tough Seville girl who serves as a bridge between the naivete of Salvatore’s fantasies and the unyielding reality of Carmen’s future (she’s also a total badass with a bolo, which “Viva Carmen” takes full advantage of during its few but fantastic action scenes).
Together, Salvatore and Belén sow a sweet friction into the film’s relationship between the dictums of fate and failure, especially as they allow “Viva Carmen” to emphasize how Seville’s community of lost children might respond to the bloodshed in their midst. The mishegoss between and Carmen and José still drives the plot of course, just as it shapes the story’s rhythm; Laudenbach uses it as an excuse to riff on Bizet’s “Habanera” in the first of the film’s two musical numbers, and later — in a scene crucial to this adaptation’s emphasis on female agency and the folly of impinging upon it — to stage a moonlit bonfire that unites Carmen’s friends in song, the animation distilling these women into pure feeling with a clarity that mocks the literalism of “Inside Out.” But the doomed lovers are largely relegated to the background here, as Laudenbach reframes the opera’s star-crossed romance for its impact on the kids who are forced to watch it unfold.
“Viva Carmen” is still packed to the gills with more plot than it can handle, but the film sings — sometimes literally — through its details. The shadows that flicker across the walls of a narrow alley as Belén fights off some witless soldiers. The way that Antonio’s carving stone turns the entire screen slate gray, the sparks from José’s knife popping off like shooting stars. The sunset that anachronistically melts into a Monet painting, pointing forward to the beauty that will survive the sadness to come.
“Fate is fate,” one character laments. “It sucks.” That may be the case, but the future will always remain unfinished in our own time, a fact that Laudenbach’s mutable animation — which appears to be unfinished itself, the colors always looking for cracks in the lines around them — more vividly brings to life than his film’s script ever could. For all of her well-earned cynicism, Belén will come to appreciate that past isn’t always prologue; that today’s failures don’t necessarily doom us to the tomorrow they seem to anticipate. “They say a person is never truly dead if you still think about them,” someone consoles her. And the same, this entrancing spindle of a movie suggests, might also be true of hope.
Grade: B+
“Viva Carmen” premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newsletter In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.
