General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Donkey Skin

Donkey Skin (French: Peau d'âne) is a 1970 French musical fantasy film directed by Jacques Demy, adapted from Charles Perrault's fairy tale of the same name. Catherine Deneuve plays a princess who flees her kingdom disguised in a donkey's skin to escape marriage to her own father, the king (Jean Marais), with songs by Michel Legrand and a supporting cast that includes Delphine Seyrig as the Lilac Fairy and Jacques Perrin as the prince.¹ It was Demy's first film after returning to France from Hollywood, and it became the biggest box-office success of his career in his home country.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Peau d'âne; released in France on 20 December 1970 (CNC visa of 7 December 1970)³
Source	Charles Perrault's fairy tale, first published in 1694 in verse⁴
Principal cast	Catherine Deneuve (the queen/princess), Jean Marais (the king), Delphine Seyrig (the Lilac Fairy), Jacques Perrin (the prince), Micheline Presle and Fernand Ledoux (the red queen and king)¹
Key crew	Producer Mag Bodard; music Michel Legrand; cinematography Ghislain Cloquet; costumes Gitt Magrini and Augusto Pace²
French box office	About 2.2 million admissions, 12th place for 1970, Demy's biggest hit⁵
Runtime and format	90 minutes, color, 1.66:1¹
US release	22 October 1971⁶

Spoilers

Story and source

The film follows Perrault's tale closely in outline. A dying queen makes her husband promise to remarry only a woman more beautiful than herself; the only such woman in the kingdom is their own daughter. Unwilling to wed her father, the princess consults her godmother, the Lilac Fairy, who advises her to demand a series of seemingly impossible gifts in exchange for her hand: dresses the color of the weather, of the moon, and of the sun. When the king fulfills every wish, she demands the skin of his prized donkey, a creature that excretes gold and jewels, and flees wearing it, finding work as a scullery maid in a neighboring kingdom where a prince falls in love with her.²^•⁷

The incestuous premise kept the tale less well known outside France than Perrault's "Cinderella" or "Sleeping Beauty," and Demy retained it rather than softening it, playing the story's taboos with a tone that sits between the earnest and the satiric.²^•¹ Demy said he wanted to make the film "from the perspective of my eyes when I was eight years old," having read Perrault as a child and staged puppet shows of his tales.²

Production

Demy had wanted to film the story as far back as 1962, when he hoped to cast Brigitte Bardot and Anthony Perkins. After the success of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort and his two-year stay in Los Angeles, the producer Mag Bodard was able to secure financing, and the film became Demy's first project after returning to France.²

Shooting and locations. Filming began on 1 June 1970 and lasted eight weeks, which Demy chose to take advantage of summer light. The crew worked at the châteaux of Chambord and Plessis-Bourré in the Loire valley, used for the blue castle, the red castle, and the wedding, and at Neuville in the Yvelines for the farm and forest-hut scenes, with the final scene at Pierrefonds in the Oise.⁵

The production's most notorious prop was the skin itself, a real animal hide obtained from an abattoir. It had to be retouched repeatedly to remove odors and was doubled four or five times during shooting; Deneuve was never told of its provenance. The British painter Jim Leon, whom Demy had met in the United States, designed the set maquettes that the art director Jacques Dugied realized.⁵

The film went significantly over budget; according to the CNC's anniversary account the overrun was about 800,000 francs and strained Demy's relationship with the production. Demy himself called the finished film "an inspired mixture of makeshift and magic."⁵^•²

Music and design

Michel Legrand wrote the songs, with lyrics by Demy, continuing the partnership behind The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and The Young Girls of Rochefort. As on Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, Deneuve's singing was dubbed in postproduction by Anne Germain.⁵ The score includes "Amour, Amour," performed by Germain.⁸

The visual design is built on saturated, deliberately artificial color: the courtiers and horses of the princess's kingdom are painted blue, those of the prince's kingdom red, and the king's throne is shaped like a giant white cat. Costumes by Gitt Magrini and Augusto Pace push each royal character's wardrobe toward maximum flamboyance.²^•⁶ Demy filled the film with tributes to Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946), casting Jean Marais, who had played the Beast, as the king, and echoing Cocteau's reverse-motion effects, living caryatids, and talking rose.²^•⁴

Reception and legacy

Most French critics greeted the film enthusiastically: Jean-Louis Bory of the Nouvel Observateur praised its maintenance of "the confusion between the real and the marvelous," while some partisans of the New Wave found it stuffy. The French public embraced it regardless, making it the 12th most popular film of 1970 in France with about 2.2 million admissions, and Demy's top box-office hit of all his work; neither The Pied Piper (1972) nor any later film equaled it.²^•⁵ Contemporary film-journal reviews were harsher, describing the style as gaudy and excessive, and two compared the film to a "shop window"; a 2017 Warwick thesis argues that few of these critics acknowledged the film's intended child audience.⁹

In France the film remains a classic children's film, kept well known by regular television broadcasts; Deneuve said the princess is the role by which children most often recognize her.⁹ The Criterion Collection issued a 2K restoration as Spine #718, with a 1970 on-set television interview and a 1971 American Film Institute Q&A with Demy among the extras.¹ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 89% critics score.⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1970s and 1980s

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

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