As with most operas, the story was never the primary selling point of “Carmen,” so to adapt it with the music heavily downplayed in favor of the narrative is an audacious move; refashioning this tale of murderous, hot-blooded amour fou as a children’s film, doubly so. But Georges Bizet’s 1875 opera has always been an versatile text on film, withstanding interpretations ranging from Jean-Luc Godard’s postmodern “First Name: Carmen” to the South African township musical “uCarmen-eKhayelitsha” to a Beyoncé-starring “hip-hopera.” So the French animated feature “Viva Carmen” follows in a proud, elastic tradition — and if Sébastien Laudenbach’s film isn’t the hottest “Carmen” ever to hit the screen, it’s certainly the most blazingly bright.
A veritable triumph of movement, design and, above all, color, “Viva Carmen” is a film for any fanciful children (or former children) inclined to memorize the names of every Crayola shade in the box, and to make up others besides. For no existing term feels entirely suitable for certain intensely burnt hues of apricot, magenta and aubergine that Laudenbach (in collaboration with graphic designer Cyril Pedrosa) liberally splashes across the screen here. With a palette selected to evoke the high temperatures and high passions of 19th-century Andalusia, and fluidly shifting as the action moves from day to night, from searing sun to blessed shade, this is the most extravagantly painterly animated feature in recent memory, thanks also to Laudenbach’s distinctively minimalist, bold-brushstroke line work and character design — immediately recognizable to anybody who saw his 2023 breakout film “Chicken for Linda!”
