English Dub Review: I Lost My Body

French studios are becoming a growth contributor to adult animation. Long thought to be just a cheap way to get pre-school/K series that Disney Jr./Nick Jr. can take advantage of, a wave of television and film projects are starting to get over here. The content that isn’t dubbed for English hardly makes a blip, but when the studios take the time and effort to get quality English dubbed adaptations of French-produced content, it usually works. This Oscar season, we’ve already seen another French-produced feature film in Funan blow our minds and last year VRV/Mondo’s Lastman is proof that we could be on the verge of an invasion that could potentially rival Japan in terms of international influence.

Fortunately for the United States, we have a deep-pocketed streaming service yearning for original content in the form of Netflix. The largest service in the world is scouring the globe looking for original content for here in the United States, and I Lost My Body could be yet another Netflix original that goes on to win an Academy Award.

From director Jeremy Clapin, I Lost My Body is a little over eighty-minute feature-length that, like most animated TV series, has an A-plot and a B-plot. The A-plot revolves around Naofel’s (voiced by Dev Patel) journey to be acquainted with a love interest. The B-plot? A severed hand escapes a Parisian laboratory and goes off a much more daring adventure traversing through an urban setting rabid with rats, pigeons, and traffic so that it may reunite with its body.

The romantic escapades of Naofel is a much more classic French love story that has helped the local industry’s film industry thrive for generations, just made contemporary to appeal to a millennial audience that probably wouldn’t watch this movie in theaters anyway. The YA-tale enlists heavyweight actors Alia Shawkat as “Gabrielle”, the brilliant George Wendt as her uncle “Gigi”, and the aforementioned Patel as “Naofel” who soon becomes a workshop apprentice for Gigi that is anything but an accidental coincidence.

The premise involving the hand is clearly the work of a director in love with horror films, but you can’t make a whole hour about JUST the hand, right? So, you gotta have both plots to feed each intended audience and really the balance is rather flawless and really both halves of the film are written rather beautifully. Patel and Shawkat are knockouts in their respective performances and they really beg the question as to why we don’t have “Best VA” categories for the Academy Awards. In any event, Clapin and Xilam Animation collectively put together their finest performances to date with outstanding choreography, gorgeous visuals, and multiple endings that you wish would happen, but don’t, therefore you’ll find yourself begging for a second installment.

I Lost My Body is the French animation industry putting us Americans on notice…here’s hoping it works.