Beaupré the Giant

Director Alain Fournier stands out for his hybrid approach, still rather uncommon in Quebec, which shatters the boundary between traditional animation and live-action filmmaking. After experimenting with 3D in Le temple (2022), he returns here with a “classic” animated film, relying on the traditional technique of puppet animation. A filmmaker who usually excels in the fantasy genre, Fournier wisely chose, for this particular film, to embrace this old-school method, as it allows him to tell, with a certain attention to realism, a tangible chapter of Quebec’s history and to revisit a less-than-glorious, though well-documented, past.

The giant Beaupré is a figure of Quebec folklore, having even inspired a song by the band Beau Dommage. Fournier, for his part, chooses to depict the painful life of this 2.52-meter-tall giant, whose real name was Édouard Beaupré. Forced by fate to become a circus attraction, he died in 1904 at the age of 23. His body, discovered in a storage shed, was displayed for over eight decades at the anatomy lab of the Université de Montréal.

The rough textures of the figurines and the film’s art direction highlight the harshness of this chapter of history. Through this work, Alain Fournier pays a well-deserved tribute to Beaupré, a tragic victim of obscurantism.

Marco de Blois
Artistic Director
Sommets du cinéma d’animation