Review: Samuel

Back in 2024, a mutual of mine from France who goes by Joff Robert online, was telling me and some others in an animation-focused server about this miniseries called Samuel. Created by Animation School of Angoulême graduate Émilie Tronche, it was about a boy named Samuel living  and produced by ARTE, a famous Franco-German publicly-funded channel and focus on pan-European culture. (Fun fact: this is the channel the first season of Home Movies aired on in France and Germany for their respective dubs).

Long story short, it was a hit across French social media. TikToks of the show would go viral (this one instance of a dance animation set to the song “Leave the Door Open” got replicated by a dance group in Indonesia) and if you check Letterboxd, it’s being rated high by the young millennial and zoomer crowd on there. A list that goes by “Letterboxd’s Top 250 Highest Rated Narrative TV Miniseries Of All Time” has it at #6 of the list overall, right above acclaimed miniseries such as the Over the Garden Wall and under series such as Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Monster, and Cowboy Bebop. This makes it the highest rated western animated miniseries on the website, but also, you will see that it’s the highest rated animated thing period released in 2024.

With this type of fanfare and love behind it, it was something I wanted to experience for myself, but was doubtful it would ever be something I could access with English subtitles in a legal manner. So, when news came up of it being distributed by Netflix, I was more than happy with that. There are many problems with streaming, but one the best things about it is people around the world being exposed to series would otherwise not be able to see through broadcast format; this includes being able to watch series in their original language or a dub made specifically for you. The people at BubbleBlabber alone has covered series coming from Italy, Poland, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Three of those are hosted on Netflix, who has certainly taken advantage of hosting a wide array of animated series, and this distribution deal is no exception.

So when I watched this the day it dropped on the streaming service, I was fully expecting it to be in French with an English dub available as an option. To my surprise, the only available option Netflix has is English with the English subtitles corresponding to that. Why is that? We’ll get into that, but first, let’s get into what this show is about.

Through 21 episodes each with a runtime of 4 minutes (minus the last episode which is close to 5 ½ minutes), we follow a young boy named Samuel and his thoughts as he navigates life and his desires. All of this is told from the perspective of him writing in a diary he got for his birthday from one of his relatives. We explore his longtime crush, his relationship with his friends and classmates, as well as his activities from the past few days based on when he’s writing.

One thing that strikes instantly about the series is how minimalistic it looks. Every character is drawn with maybe 1 or 2 identifiable faces with the only differing thing between them is height and the color and style of their hair. There is no color in this world besides white and black; this not only goes for the backgrounds but also when it comes to characters’ ethnicities. A key part of the series is the many forms of dance that it includes, often coming with a healthy dose of symmetry and form only animation can provide (there are some wild dances too as well). A lot of this is accompanied by songs, all in English, French or Spanish.

I knew going in that the series only had one narrator (the creator Émilie herself) that voiced Samuel and every other character from his perspective, and other dubs of this series follow suit. The Spanish and Catalan dubs had locally-known actress Estel Tort, while the German dub had locally-known actress Cornelia Gröschel. I keep saying “dub”, as if they took the original footage and just recorded new audio, but that’s not entirely the case.

See, this series was animated in TV Paint, and it appears that what they have done here and with the other non-French versions of this series is re-do all the writing so it can be in English while keeping the original assets. Even in the English credits, there’s a section dedicated to the “US Version” [which is ironic since the narrator in this version is Eleanor Noble, the president of the Alliance of Canadian Cinema, Television and Radio Artists (ACTRA)]. Despite its relatively white-centric suburbanite setting, it seems the crew wanted the experiences of childhood to be felt by as many people watching. Heck, in interviews the creator has said that while Samuel’s life is based on her childhood (even down to the house and school he goes to), she didn’t want to be exclusionary in the experiences. She even made Samuel a boy to further distance his world from being too similar to her own.

As someone that is an American, I believe it works for the most part. Eleanor provides the emotion necessary for a preteen boy exploring their feelings regarding relationships, both romantic and platonic. They even go out their way to reference specific states and cities like New Jersey and Miami. Even when Samuel writes in his diary, I’m reminded of many a Peanuts specials where the text appears above Charlie Brown’s head as he writes. I will admit, part of the reason I wanted to check this out was because I WANTED to see a uniquely European take on an animated show aiming at something more melancholy for a general crowd. Still, I can’t deny growing up in the suburbs is a very common experience for those of us who grew up in the western world in the 2000s. 

The changes they do make in terms of references is fascinating to me for any series, and I thank my mutual Joff Robert for verifying these for me. In one episode, the character of Mabel writes down that when she grows up, she wants to work at FNAC (a store chain that sells entertainment media and electronics located throughout France) and this US Version changes that to Best Buy, both in dialogue and writing. In another episode, when Samuel and some of his male friends are watching music videos, a segment of them dancing comes up overlaid with the Sean Kingston song “Beautiful Girls”, while in the original it was “Last Night” by Diddy and Keyshia Cole (though I’m sure this was done to avoid controversy).  Some changes are however too big to overcome in terms of being able to identify how European this series is, which I don’t mind (despite the changing attitude towards it in recent years, soccer is not big enough in the USA for me to fully believe an average American boy like Samuel would want a Donovan jersey).

This is a series that isn’t afraid to show what it was like when you were at that time in your childhood where you were unsure of how to approach certain situations and questions and tried to rationalize that what you were doing was good in some way. It’s not a complex exploration or anything, but this is one of those cases where the decision to make the animation as simplistic as possible paid off. Netflix decided to rate this in the United States as TV-14 for “language”, which is ironic since the viewer later finds out the main protagonist was 10 years old the whole time. There’s some commentary in there about the real life experiences of people at that age (especially now with how online everything is) but it’s worth unpacking with those closest to you.

Simplicistic animation helps sell the universal experiences of being a kid and wanting people to like you back. If you’ve been starving for that animated take on “sometimes kids need to know they’re losers” that you haven’t seen since the Peanuts comic strips and cartoons, this will fill that gap.