Phantom Boy

Phantom Boy (2015)

My name is Leo and I have a secret

At a hospital in New York, Alex, a police officer, meets Leo, a boy who has the ability to get out of his body and pass through the walls like a ghost. Both team up with Mary, an intrepid journalist, to capture a disfigured villain who terrorizes the city.

Date of release
2015-10-14
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (78)
Runtime
1h 22m
Genres
Animation, Fantasy, Mystery
Director
Alain Gagnol, Jean-Loup Felicioli

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Budget: €5.5M
  • Awards: 1 · Nominations: 0. Including: CICFF Professional Jury Award for Best Animated Feature Film

Phantom Boy is a 2015 animated fantasy film directed by Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gagnol and written by Alain Gagnol. The film stars Édouard Baer, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Audrey Tautou, Jackie Berroyer, Gaspard Gagnol and Noa Bernaoui-Savreux. The film was released in France on October 14, 2015, by Diaphana Films.

Production

Phantom Boy is the second film co-directed by Alain Gagnol and Jean-Loup Felicioli, who had already worked together on A Cat in Paris, an animated film inspired by film noir set in Paris. For Phantom Boy, the two directors chose to mix the detective genre with the fantastic, two genres not often associated in animated films, and to create a detective film for children. They also drew some of their inspiration from American superhero stories.

The film's title uses the English word phantom, chosen because it evokes less the idea of a ghost than the word ghost, as its sounds are closer to French and the film's creators find them more poetic. In its early stages, the project also had a French title, Insaisissable.

The visual universe of Phantom Boy is similar to that of A Cat in Paris. Again, the directors opted for a cartoon whose animation is done by hand on paper, with computer work taking place only at a later stage. Likewise, the adopted graphic style aims to showcase the "touch" of the artists.

The New York of Phantom Boy is designed from photos of modern-day New York, but by relocating certain buildings or changing their angles to invent a slightly different New York. The sets are drawn in wax chalk on paper before being refined on a computer, without erasing the traces of pencil and chalk strokes.

The OpenToonz software, also used by Studio Ghibli, is one of the tools used to create this animated feature film.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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