#french things

And they are really funny. Christian Broutin had an interesting... perception of Middle-Earth.

I don't have high quality pictures of the first one (The Fellowship of the Ring, part 1) but you can see that it shows Gandalf escaping Isengard thanks to the eagle... With at the bottom what can be as much Gollum as the Watcher in the Water or some goblin. It is... hard to tell. "The Fellowship of the Ring part 2" meanwhile made the interesting choice to focus on the often-forgotten crebain. EDIT: @barrymccaulkinem made the more logical suggestion that this green thing on book 1 corresponds to the Barrows sequence. It would make more sense.

Two Towers is divided between, on one side what I think is a depiction of Isengard but with the guy from the poster of Bakshi's Wizards that strolled in (plus random creepy eyes underneath) ; and on the other the cutest Shelob you'll ever see.

Finally you have The Return of the King, and while part 2 is a fairly traditional fall of Barad-dûr scene, the part 1 is the best of them all... The Witch-King riding a giant fearthless chicken.

I'm not kidding. The typical Guignol story is: an innocent woman is being attacked by a policeman who wants to arrest her for nothing, the puppeteer then turns the puppet of the woman towards the audience and asks the children "He can't do that ! (or "he's not allowed to do that") Can he ?" and the children are encouraged to shout "NO ! HE CAN'T !" as loud as they can. Then the puppet woman and the children all call Guignol for help and he saves the day by beating the police officer's ass with a big stick and saving the innocent woman.

This is through this video that I discovered that the Occitanie-region branch of France 3 (the regional channel of France, with specific sub-channels for every region of France) was producing these animated shorts about typical Occitanie fairytales, and was reposting them on Youtube, all fresh... But not French.

Because checking another video, about the tale "The three oranges", confirmed that the tales are told in the occitan language (with French subtitles), hence the name "Tales of Oc".

All this needs a brief cultural explanation however for those unfamiliar with the French language... Yes just like with other languages, French had evolutions. You have contemporary French, modern French, new French, middle French, old French the further you go back in time. Like Old English, Old German, all these things. BUT... Before the French language was unified and united (which took a very long time) there was actually a LOT of Frenches, not just one language but a lot of dialects and regional languages. And of all of them, two specific languages rose up as the "main ones" of France. One was the "oïl language", which was spoken in the northern part of France, the other was the "oc language" spoken in the southern part of France. Roughly speaking, it was the "two Frenches", to simply things. Their divide was very present in early and mid-Middle Ages, and this shows in language. For example, the "minstrel" (ménestrel in French) existed in two types, speaking the two languages: trouvères in the North, making songs in oïl language, troubadours in the South, making oc poetry. (The North-South divide is usually geographically pointed with the Loire river, the "natural frontier").

In the end, the "oïl" language is the one that won and evolved into mainstream, current French, imposing itself over the "oc" language, who only survived in regional southern tongues, dialects such as the occitan that these fairytales are being told into (here is another video about "The Drac")

You might have heard of Occitanie recently if you went by the folk-songs side of Youtube as there's a lot of Occitan songs being shared around, with a lot of foreigners enjoying deeply the Occitan sounds (or the pseudo-Occitan sounds sometimes...). Songs like "Ai vist lo lop", the Occitan variation of the famous song "I saw the wolf, the fox and the hare". Anyway.

These videos do not have English subtitles, only French ones. The fact they say this is the "Occitan version" implies there's a French version somewhere to double it? But so far, if you are curious about modern fairytale animations with a regional language, this series is being released on Youtube. Here is a last episode for now, "The sunken city"