General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Belle et Sébastien 2: The Adventure Continues

Belle et Sébastien 2: The Adventure Continues (French: Belle et Sébastien : l'aventure continue) is a 2015 French family adventure film directed by Christian Duguay, the second installment of the live-action Belle et Sébastien film series adapted from the 1960s television series created by Cécile Aubry. It was released in French cinemas on 9 December 2015.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director	Christian Duguay, a Quebec filmmaker who replaced Nicolas Vanier, director of the 2013 first film²
Screenplay	Juliette Sales and Fabien Suarez, based on the series written and directed by Cécile Aubry³
Music	Armand Amar³
Main cast	Félix Bossuet (Sébastien), Tchéky Karyo (César), Thierry Neuvic (Pierre), Margaux Chatelier (Angelina), Thylane Blondeau (Gabrielle)⁴
Setting	1945, in a liberated France, two years after the first film; Sébastien is 10 years old⁵
Release	9 December 2015 (France); about 1.8 million admissions in France¹^•⁶
Runtime	97 minutes (Australian classification); the press kit lists 1h39⁷^•³
Production	Radar Films, Epithète Films, Gaumont, M6 Films, and Rhône-Alpes Cinéma³

Spoilers

Story

The film takes place in 1945, in a France newly freed from Nazi occupation, where life in the mountains has regained its calm. Sébastien (Félix Bossuet), now 10 years old, waits with his dog Belle for the return of Angelina (Margaux Chatelier). The young resistance fighter disappears in a plane crash in the transalpine forests, and Sébastien and his grandfather César (Tchéky Karyo) are soon the only ones who keep hope of finding her. As a violent forest fire spreads over the crash zone, César is forced to ask for help from Pierre (Thierry Neuvic), an aviator he dislikes; while flying over the forest, the pilot discovers that Sébastien and Belle have hidden in the back of his plane.⁵^•¹

The screenwriters, Juliette Sales and Fabien Suarez, said they wanted a film very different from the first one. Where the 2013 film covered four seasons and centered on the beginning of the friendship between the dog and the lonely child, the sequel unfolds over only a few days and shifts its dramatic focus to the father-and-child relationship, as Sébastien finds and bonds with a family. They kept what they called the DNA of the first film, with a central place for nature, the dog, the child, and the elements, fire in particular, and a strong animal presence, including a fight between Belle and a wild animal. The story loosely echoes the second season of Cécile Aubry's original series, in which Sébastien finds his father, though the writers devised their own version of that relationship.⁸

Production

After the first Belle et Sébastien (2013), directed by Nicolas Vanier, drew more than 2.8 million admissions in France and about 4.5 million worldwide, Gaumont launched a sequel.⁹ Vanier could not return because of a scheduling conflict with his next project, L'École buissonnière, and the producers turned to Christian Duguay, whose work on the animal drama Jappeloup (2012) had convinced them. Duguay did not know the first film had been made when he was contacted and hesitated at first, but he knew the original television series well: he had watched it as a child in Montreal and later named his son Sébastien after it.⁵^•²^•⁹

Filming locations. The shoot ran in two regions. The first part took place in August 2014 in Haute Maurienne Vanoise (Savoie), where several sets from the first film returned, including the hamlet of L'Écot standing in for the village of Saint-Martin, the school at Bonneval-sur-Arc, César's chalet in the Avérole valley, the pont de la Lame, and the Sollières airfield and rocher Saint-Claude. For the second part the production wanted wooded middle mountains, still in the Rhône-Alpes region, and chose the Haut-Bugey in the Ain department, filming there from 8 September to 15 October 2014, one day ahead of schedule. About 60 percent of the film was shot in the Ain: the refugee camp was built near the pont de Pérignat at Izernore, a spectacular forced-landing scene was filmed on the shores of Lake Genin at Charix, and the in-flight cabin scenes were shot on the ground at the Arbent airfield, with the aircraft, including a Beechcraft 18 twin-engine plane in US Army colors, hung from a crane against a blue screen. Post-production, covering special effects and music, lasted six months.¹⁰^•⁶^•¹¹

The animal trainer Andrew Simpson, who had worked on the first film as well as on Nicolas Vanier's Loup and Jean-Jacques Annaud's The Last Wolf, returned as dresseur, bringing women trainers from the United States.⁹^•⁴

Reception

The film earned about 1.8 million admissions in France, well below the first film's figure.⁶ On AlloCiné it received a press average of 2.8 out of 5 from 12 reviews and a spectator average of 3.8 out of 5 from 1,902 ratings.¹²^•¹³

Critics were divided. 20 Minutes called it more successful and better paced than the first film, and Télérama described a dynamic old-fashioned adventure story with the air of Tintin in Tibet, while Les Fiches du Cinéma saw a shift from "nature and discovery" toward "Indiana Jones" in the perilous rescue of the missing Angelina. Le Monde found the film gentle and well paced but criticized its idealized imagery; La Croix called the plot predictable yet praised the scene in which animals of all species cross a river to flee the fire.¹²

Release and follow-up

The film was rated PG in Australia ("mild themes and coarse language") and was distributed internationally under titles including Belle and Sebastian 2 and Belle and Sebastian: The Adventure Continues; in Germany it appeared as Sebastian und die Feuerretter.⁷^•¹⁴ The DVD was released on 9 April 2016, and a novelization written by Sales and Suarez from the screenplay was published by Hachette Romans on 4 November 2015.¹⁵^•¹⁶ A third installment, Belle et Sébastien 3, followed two years later, filmed in Haute Maurienne and the Briançonnais.¹¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026