General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Belle et Sébastien

Belle et Sébastien is a 2013 French family adventure film directed by Nicolas Vanier, adapted from the 1965 children's television series of the same name created by Cécile Aubry, about a lonely boy in the Second World War-era French Alps who tames a large white dog named Belle.¹^•² Produced by Radar Films and Epithète Films in coproduction with Gaumont, M6 Films, and the Centre Européen Cinématographique Rhône-Alpes, it stars Félix Bossuet, Tchéky Karyo, Margaux Chatelier, Dimitri Storoge, Andreas Pietschmann, Urbain Cancelier, and Mehdi El Glaoui, and was released in France on 18 December 2013.³

Key fact	Detail
Release	18 December 2013 in France; CNC visa 133847 issued 31 October 2013; rated "Tous publics" (all audiences)¹
Runtime	99 minutes per the CNC visa record; Gaumont and the César Academy list 98 minutes¹^•²
Director and writers	Nicolas Vanier; screenplay by Vanier, Juliette Sales, and Fabien Suarez, from Cécile Aubry's series³
Music	Original score by Armand Amar, with Zaz re-recording the series titles "Belle" and "L'oiseau"⁴
French admissions	3,005,484 over 12 weeks in French theaters (18 December 2013 to 11 March 2014)⁴
Worldwide box office	$27,042,499, against a reported production budget of $11,400,000⁵
Sequel	Belle et Sébastien: l'aventure continue, directed by Christian Duguay, released in France on 9 December 2015⁶

Spoilers

Plot

The story is set in 1943 in a village in the French Alps, in occupied France near the Swiss border.⁷ Sébastien, a young orphan, lives with César, the old shepherd who took him in after his mother abandoned him.⁷ When villagers hunt the large animal they believe has been killing their sheep, Sébastien encounters the great white dog, tames her, and names her Belle; he must protect her after she is wounded in the villagers' hunt.⁷ German soldiers then install themselves in the village to watch the mountain passes used by clandestine refugees crossing into Switzerland, and the boy and his dog help French resistance fighters elude a Nazi plan to capture them.⁷^•⁸ The narrative also follows an old man looking for his past, a Resistance member looking for love, a young woman seeking adventure, and a German lieutenant seeking forgiveness.³

Sequels and franchise

The film launched a franchise. The first sequel, Belle et Sébastien: l'aventure continue, directed by Christian Duguay, received its CNC visa on 18 November 2015 and reached French theaters on 9 December 2015, with a runtime of 97 minutes, again rated for all audiences and distributed by Gaumont.⁶ A third film completed the trilogy, released on home video as Belle et Sébastien: la trilogie by the Bibliothèque nationale de France's catalog.¹⁵ The film's worldwide home-video release in English-speaking markets came from Film Movement Video on 31 March 2015 under the title Belle and Sebastian.⁵

Origins and adaptation

The film adapts the television series Belle et Sébastien, written and directed by the French actress and author Cécile Aubry, who first told the story as a novel and then starred her son, Mehdi El Glaoui, in the series, which ran from 1965 to 1970 and was dubbed into English for the BBC under the title Belle and Sebastian.⁹ The serial spawned two further thirteen-part color sequels, Sébastien parmi les hommes (1968), retitled Belle, Sebastian and the Horses by the BBC, and Sébastien et la Mary-Morgane (1970), which the BBC did not broadcast.⁹ The British series's popularity later inspired the Scottish indie band of the same name.⁹

In 1981 a 52-episode animated version, Meiken Jolie, appeared on French, Italian, and Japanese television, with the American cable network Nickelodeon picking it up in 1984.⁹ The 2013 film was therefore not the first adaptation of Aubry's story; the Japanese broadcaster NHK had drawn on her six-volume novel series decades earlier.¹⁰

A link across fifty years. Mehdi El Glaoui, the child actor who played Sébastien in the original 1965 series, appears in the 2013 film as André, leaving the part of Sébastien to the younger Félix Bossuet.¹⁰ For the 2013 adaptation, Vanier moved the time frame to a Second World War setting.⁹

Production and music

Unifrance records the film as a 100 percent French production with a production year of 2012, shot in French in Scope format with Dolby SRD sound.¹¹ Eric Guichard was the cinematographer and Armand Amar composed the score.² Amar also rearranged the two signature titles of the original series, "Belle" (from Belle et Sébastien) and "L'oiseau" (from Sébastien parmi les hommes), which the singer Zaz performed; one appears over the end credits and the other during a mountain play scene, and the young Félix Bossuet sings "Belle" in the film itself after Sébastien names the dog.⁴ One of the dogs that played Belle, Fripon, was an Italian patou, a breed of mountain sheepdog.¹²

Box office

The film opened strongly in the French holiday season: its first full week drew 683,604 admissions, the second week 854,924, and the third 591,147, for a cumulative 2,129,675 by 7 January 2014.⁴ The fan-maintained reference site totals 3,005,484 French admissions over twelve weeks, ranking the film twelfth at the French box office for 2013, while AlloCiné lists a French total of 2,869,466 admissions; the two figures differ by the counting window used.⁴^•¹⁰ Internationally, the film sold 4,544,610 tickets in nine countries, including 1,174,235 in Italy, where it was a major success after a world premiere presentation at the Rome Film Festival in 2013.⁴^•¹²

In dollar terms, The Numbers records a worldwide total of $27,042,499, with France at $12,581,443, against a production budget of $11,400,000, so the worldwide gross ran about 2.4 times the budget.⁵ Its release spread through 2014 and beyond: Belgium, Switzerland, and France on 18 December 2013, Germany and Hungary the next day, Italy on 23 January 2014, and the United Kingdom on 7 November 2014; the film also reached Russia (CIS) only in 2018.¹³^•⁵

Reception

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 91 percent Tomatometer from 11 critics and a 65 percent audience Popcornmeter.⁸ AlloCiné shows a press score of 2.8 out of 5 from 18 reviews against a spectator score of 4.0 from nearly 4,000 ratings.¹⁰ Festival selections included the Festival du Film Francophone d'Angoulême 2013 and the Grand Lyon Film Festival 2013.¹³ It also won the Youth Jury Award for Films4Families Feature at the Seattle International Film Festival and Best Film 2014 at the Children KinoFest in Ukraine.⁴

French commentary focused on the film's treatment of the Occupation. Le Monde's review, published the day before release, noted that parents might raise an eyebrow at its naive vision of the Nazi occupation serving as the story's backdrop.¹⁴ The Quebec classification notes describe a narrative of only very light dramatic moments, quickly resolved by the actions of many endearing characters, following a pure-hearted child in the majestic French Alps.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Action and adventure films (individual works) › Adventure films › Released 2005 to 2026

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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