Exhibition, comics, films, series ... Asterix continues to inspire new projects

He hadn't told us everything, Getafix.

In his pot, in addition to the ingredients to bring strength and invincibility to his Gallic comrades, the druid has visibly also slipped the elixir of eternal youth.

Nothing, neither the decades nor the turn of the century, not even the death of its screenwriter René Goscinny, who died at 51 in 1977 or that of its designer Albert Uderzo, who died in 2020 at the age of 92, had because of the vitality of "Asterix", the character with 385 million comics sold around the world.

Read also At the heart of the exhibition "Uderzo, like a magic potion", in the footsteps of the co-creator of Asterix

Born in 1959 under de Gaulle, literally put into orbit in 1965 with the launch of the first French satellite that bears its name, the Asterix rocket has never crashed, constantly expanding its empire with variations in cartoons, films, series , amusement park, still there as a safe haven in these uncertain times and this anxiety-provoking year.

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Uderzo and Asterix: the saga of an irreducible French myth

This Thursday, May 27, the cultural phenomenon even enters the museum.

After Miró, Klimt, Botero, Magritte or Toulouse-Lautrec, it was Albert Uderzo who posthumously received the laurels of an event exhibition at the Maillol museum in Paris (7th arrondissement).

The consecration for a giant of humorous comics who, alongside his accomplice Goscinny, has contributed to giving its letters of nobility to a discipline hitherto mocked and now crowned with the nickname of "ninth art".

Chabat, entertainment side, Canet, cinema side

A designer son of Italian immigrants and a screenwriter of Polish Jewish origin who gave birth to the most solid French cultural myth of the post-war period: history is beautiful. "Asterix says a lot about us," commented this Wednesday evening Brigitte Macron who spent two hours in the exhibition. We are a people of resistance. "The first lady exchanged with Ada Uderzo the wife of Asterix's father, slipping him in passing in a wink that her husband President is also" an irreducible ", and not hiding her tenderness for Bonemine, the wife of chief. “We understand each other, she is pragmatic,” she joked.

Everyone therefore has a story with Asterix.

And it's not over.

On October 21, a 39th album will be released, “Asterix and the Griffon”, signed by the duo Jean-Yves Ferri and Didier Conrad, duoed by Uderzo and in the maneuver since 2013. In 2019, their previous Asterix adventure, “the Girl de Vercingétorix ”, had passed to 2.3 million copies in France (record of the year, all categories of books combined) and to 5 million in the world.

In cartoon, two big projects are in the drawers.

At the start of the school year, France Télévisions will broadcast around fifty episodes of "Idéfix et les iréducibles", the first animated series devoted to the famous dog born under Albert Uderzo's pencil.

Dogmatix and the Irreducibles.

Asterix® Obélix® Idéfix ® / © 2018 Les Editions Albert René / Goscinny-Uderzo

For his part, Alain Chabat, already director of the cult "Asterix and Obelix: Mission Cleopatra" (14 million admissions to the cinema in 2002) will launch for the first time in animation with the adaptation for Netflix of the "Battle of the chefs ”, comic strip published in 1966.

In the cinema, too, things are moving: nearly ten years after "In the service of His Majesty", a fifth film ("Asterix and Obelix: the Middle Empire") is being filmed, the first that has not been released. of an existing album.

Guillaume Canet will direct the next film Asterix and Obelix.

Eric Dessons / JDD / SIPA

Directed by Guillaume Canet, who will also play the famous little Gaul, it will bring together a five-star cast: Gilles Lellouche, Marion Cotillard, Vincent Cassel, Jérôme Commandeur, Angèle, McFly and Carlito, Bigflo and Oli, Manu Payet, Jonathan Cohen, Pierre Richard and even… Zlatan Ibrahimovic!

Will you take a small ladle of potion again?