Blake et Mortimer

Blake and Mortimer is based on the comic by Edgar P. Jacobs. Trying to fit one album (or in several cases 2 or 3) into 52 minutes is an impossible task without loosing a lot of detail. Unfortunately, that is one of the problems. I'd say this series is comparable to the animated Tintin series. Some episodes are not based on any album, and I've only seen two of them so far, but the stories hold up to the simplified stories based on the albums.

13 episodes are available on DVD region 2 in France. Luckily you can choose english as a language/subtitles for us that are not fluent in french.

For fans that can stand to see the stories change and adapted to animation, some fun can be had, if only to see new stories.

A poorly made series! The animation is of a VERY poor quality. Only the story lines saves this cartoon series. Jacobs made only a few Blake & Mortimers. That was because he was a perfectionist ; every building, car or background was photographed ( he made thousands of photographs for his albums ). His style has never been equaled, let alone surpassed ( after the first professor Sato, which he drew himself, the second part was finished by Bob de Moor - just look at the inferior quality of that second part ). By the way : Jacobs wasn't French, he was a Belgian. Hergé ( Tintin ) also was a Belgian. I frequently meet French people who know for sure that both were French citizens. Ah well, we all know that the French invented everything :D

I've watched this entire series, in English, on Canadian television and read the French comic books on which the shows are based. While the series doesn't boast the complex story lines and fantastic animation of the original books, they get the tone right and are fun to watch. Entire subplots have been thrown out to fit the shorter format, and Jacobs' incredibly dense dialogue has been thinned out, but not in an insulting or disrespectful way. One strange thing: many of the British and French characters have Canadian and American accents in the English language version, perhaps because the government of Quebec assisted with the production.

This quiet series, which is very faithful to the template in terms of its sequence and structure, is underlaid with suitable music, drawn in a style that is strongly based on the comic (even if it is still far from the quality of the drawings in the comic) and in terms of pacing a quiet affair, which, thanks to the relatively long running time, can alternately make stories exciting, msytserious and informative. A good set, best for an autumn day.