Les 12 travaux d'Astérix

The best Asterix film at the time of its release and certainly one of the best overall. "Twelve Tasks" was always a favorite of mine and watching it now, close to 20 years later, it's still as funny and imaginative as it ever was.

As an Asterix movie it's a bit of an anomaly. It isn't based on any of the comic-books (are they graphic novels?) and doesn't follow any of the continuity or logic of any of the other stories. But since it's by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo themselves you could hardly call it unofficial.

Julius Caesar calls a truce with the village and says that Gaul can rule Rome if they can win Twelve impossible tasks in the vein of Hercules a few thousand years ago. If they fail, they must surrender to Caesar. But with Asterix and Obelix as their chosen champions do you really think they will fail? The plot lends itself to lots of visual humor and irreverent satire. How can a kid's animated movie have this much depth and wit and still be relatively unknown in the wider world of Toy Stories and Ups? It's insane.

Definitely a great treat for Asterix fans and the perfect way to introduce new people to the franchise.

In the past couple of days I've been speedwatching all major cartoons of asterix and obelix, and I must say that this one is at par with the great classic ones of Disney. Sad that nowadays Disney renounced their old masterpieces, which is obviously a stupid (at the very least) thing to do. This is the best Asterix animation right until mansions of gods and might be even better. Highly recommended for all!

I've been laughing at "The Twelve Tasks of Asterix" for about 20 years now. Early on, I laughed hardest at the slapstick comedy segments. Now, I laugh hardest at the history-based jokes and sly sexual references. So you see, like all the best children's entertainment, this can be enjoyed on several different levels - some for the kiddies, some for the adults.

(The slapstick comedy is still cool to my adult self, by the way. Nothing beats watching an unruly mob of Gaulish villagers tear through a phalanx of hapless Roman dudes...)

The plot is very episodic, centering around the efforts of wily Asterix and oafish Obelix to perform twelve tasks and, if successful, become gods in the eyes of the Romans. Inevitably, some of the tasks are more interesting than others. The best one is set in the Place That Sends You Mad, a spot-on satire of bureaucracy and red tape. Probably the lamest task involves alligators and an invisible string, but even that's okay.

The animators did an excellent job capturing the style of the Asterix comic books. Oddly enough, though, the quality of the drawing is variable. Sometimes the characters look quite rough and sketchy, and other times the lines are much cleaner. However, the task set in the Beast's cave is undeniably very well-animated and even a bit creepy.

The ending is outrageous, and therefore brilliant. It brings the Asterix saga to a satisfying close (of course, the little guy's adventures continue in various formats). Speaking of the ending, pay especially close attention to Caius Tiddleus's cup when he's getting tickled by the priestess in the closing moments. It's a good, naughty sight gag.

This movie was my first exposure to Asterix, and thus I have a soft spot for it. Sentiment aside, though, I do think it's easily the best of the Asterix films, and is only rivaled by the very best comic adventures. Hey, I honestly haven't got tired of it during these twenty-odd years of occasional viewing - that's about the best endorsement I can give a film!

This is the year 50 before JC. All the Gaul is occupied by the Romans. All the Gaul? No! A little village populated by some irreducibles Gallics resists again and always to the invader. This situation gets on Jules César's nerves who's starting to compare these Gallics as gods. To have proof of this, he sets them 12 works. Astérix and Obélix are chosen to take up the challenge... This animation film isn't an adaptation from one of Astérix' albums, it's an original screenplay that inspired from the Greek mythology with Hercule's works. The movie is a pleasant surprise because the animation is more careless than in Astérix' previous adaptations for the cinema, although it's a bit basic. Concerning these "works", of course they're fanciful and eccentric but they're irresistibe, varied, full of modern anachronisms (like the chips in the sixth work when Obélix must eat a pantagruelian meal). Besides, the anachronism is a common thing in Astérix' adventures.

The best moments of the movie are the pantagruelian meal, the sequences of the hypnosis and the crazy flat. At the end, in spite of tiresome sequences, peculiar to Astérix's adaptations, I think about the (useless) battle against the Romans at the beginning, the movie is a happy entertainment and the best animation film with Astérix.

Once again, in the year 50 BC, the Romans are having the holy hell beat out of them by a small village of defiant Gauls, who have inhuman powers, thanks to a magic potion. Rather common, as we all know. Hence the rumor spreads among the fearful Romans, that those Gauls could potentially be gods (unlike in the comics, the Romans here aren't aware of the magic potion). Bad news for Emperor Julius Caesar, who offers chieftain Vitalstatistix a deal: the chief's most capable men (obviously Asterix and Obelix) must complete twelve tasks. If they fail, the village must give up their defiance. If they win however, Caesar will accept their divinity and relinquish his crown – or rather his laurel wreath. Hence, our heroes must run faster than Greek marathon-runner Asbestos, beat Verses (the Persian) at javelin, beat Cilindric (the German) at a fistfight, cross a lake that is the home of sirens, survive the hypnotic gaze of Iris (the Egyptian), eat an enormous meal at Calorofix' (the Belgian) tavern, make it alive through the "cave of the beast", retrieve Permit A38 in "The Place that sends you mad", cross a ravine filled with hungry crocodiles via an invisible tightrope, answer the question of an old man on the mountain, spend a night on the haunted "plain of the dead" and finally survive a fight in the Colosseum in Rome.

Let me start off by saying, in Germany the "Asterix"-comics always had something of a family-tradition. Many a dad bring brought home the newest "Asterix" to their kids and for many kids – including myself – that was pretty much like somebody else's Dad taking his kid to a baseball-game. Actually, there were usually two copies purchased: One to be read and kept in mint-condition, the other one to take to the local grilled chicken shop and read will eating, pretending the grilled bird was grilled boar. (Don't laugh: In Germany it was not uncommon to see people sitting in the "Hendl-Shop", a German version of KFC, chowing away while reading "Asterix" and it wasn't even considered bad manners).

Having dropped that nostalgic tit-bit, I'm not the first to point out that "The Twelve Tasks of Asterix" is considered by many fans the best of all the many cartoon-adaptation. For one, it's not an adaptation, but rather a story completely unrelated to the series. The first two movies, "Asterix the Gaul" and "Asterix and Cleopatra" kept close to the comic, but missed the satire and cultural references that made the comics appealing not only to kids but to adults as well. What came later was clearly produced entirely for kids.

"The Twelve Tasks of Asterix" on the other hand could be enjoyed by both young and old, in fact, seemed to have been geared more at an adult-audience. The scene with the nymphs was rather raunchy for "Asterix"-standards, the task in the Madhouse (a pun on modern bureaucracy) probably wouldn't even make sense to younger kids, while the task with the ghost-legion was rather spooky. The animation remains the most pedestrian of all Asterix-films, but it's the seemingly careless painted backgrounds that give the film its charm and (thanks to the xerographic process) almost psychedelic feel, that at times remind of Ralph Bakshi cartoons like "Heavy Traffic", "Wizards" or many other 'artsy' 70's cartoons.

Producers often don't seem to understand that cartoons and comics are two different medias, which have only one thing in common: they're both painted. That doesn't make them compatible or easily translatable, however. Most of the 'twelve tasks' (perhaps with the exception of Obelix versus the Belgian cook; in German called Mannekinfix) wouldn't work well on paper, nor would they fit into the Asterix (comic)-formula. This is probably the reason why "The Twelve Tasks of Asterix" work, while most other Asterix-cartoons fail at capturing the magic of the comics, or – at best – appear like a pale adaptation.

The third Asterix cartoon (there would be five more, including numerous live-action films and a computer-animated cartoon) would remain the last for almost ten years. After that, the cartoons took on another formula, which usually spliced the stories from various comics together and, as said, were mainly targeting a minor audience. Whether that was because "The Twelve Tasks" was a box-office bomb or not, I cannot tell – but like many other hardcore Asterix-fans I felt sorry that future films would take the direction they did, and that "Twelve Tasks" would remain a unique experience. And this uniqueness made it the ultimate Asterix-cartoon and possibly the dearest to the hearts of most lifelong fans.

7/10