Les Pigeons

They say too many cooks spoil the broth, but five directors who met at Paris animation school Georges Méliès might disagree.

Working as a collective under the name Les Pigeons, Mehdi Alavi, Loic Bramoulle, Axel Digoix, Geoffrey Lerus and Alexandre Wolfromm got together to make their graduation film entitled Parigot, a colloquialism meaning Parisian.

A distinguished delivery driver from an upmarket restaurant struggles to hang on to the dish he’s charged with transporting to a client while fighting off Claude, the ‘pigeons’ king’, who is hell-bent on stealing the food. The directors say: “Those two characters are pathetic and they fight for causes that are not theirs – the hobo for his pigeons; the deliverer for his bosses. That is what we loved about them.”

Within seconds, the scene is set and the characters are clear. Then they embark on an epic chase through the streets of Paris, the deliverer on his motorbike and Claude aided by his birds.

There’s no dialogue in the entire film and it doesn’t need any. The action is gripping throughout and the animation mesmerising, as is the wonderfully rich city that Les Pigeons created with a painstaking attention to detail. “We were inspired by the style of Paris circa 1900 and researched many pictures from that period,” say the directors. “We also had a look at Gérard Trignac, Mucha and Hopper’s work to make the city spectacular and shining. We had in mind an amazing but credible world, and we tried to follow this idea all the way through production.”

Other influences the collective cite include animated films such as Monsters Inc, Fumiko no Kokuhaku and Oktapodi, as well as everything from comics and illustrations to video games. Did the number of directors cause arguments? “A lot! That was one of the most difficult things that we had to deal with: agree on a story, a style, a universe, everything. We had different ideas in many directions. We had to submit to the others’ wishes without giving up our own wishes, so there were months and months of negotiations.”

But they also found positives in working together, such as “the sharing of the work, especially the boring parts, and there are a lot”. They add: “We all knew what we wanted to do and what the others in the team were good at. But all the things that didn’t interest anyone still had to be done.”

The directors all work for different animation companies in Paris but as a collective are signed to Premium Film for documentaries and shorts and to Les Producers for commercials. They are keen to work as a team again when the opportunity arises and, after the success of Parigot, it probably won’t be long because in this particular case, despite the number of cooks, Les Pigeons still produced a delicious broth.