Emile Mercier’s Bisclavret (2011) is an animated short film that adapts Marie de France’s medieval werewolf lay.[1] Overall, the animated short follows the broad outlines of Marie’s narrative, although a notable addition is expanded scenes depicting the couple’s marriage that engender empathy in the viewer, thereby casting the wife’s betrayal of her husband in a more sympathetic light. There are a number of parallels to the medieval tale, not the least of which is a screenplay that offers a modern French translation in octasyllabic verse and a visual style whose clear, spare lines imitate the two-dimensional aspects of medieval manuscript illumination and whose frames are saturated with bright colors reminiscent of stained glass.[2]

Although there is much to enjoy for both adults and medieval scholars, and the film is rated for all audiences, it is clearly intended to appeal to children.[3] Both historically and in contemporary society, cartoon animation is primarily marketed to children, but apart from the medium itself, the characters are drawn with the rounded faces and jerky, ungainly movements of children, so that art imitates life, and the Bisclavret is depicted as more dog-like than wolf-like, which also reflects the werewolf’s behavioural characteristics in the Marie’s lay. More importantly, the director’s consistent efforts to minimize the violence and brutality of the medieval lay by trivializing the judicial torture of Bisclavret’s wife and depicting her physical mutilation (and that of her female descendants) as an attractive facial feature rather than a horrifying disfigurement suggests a naïve, innocent audience that is unable to fully comprehend the social consequences of adult matters such as adultery and judicial maiming. Nonetheless, despite Mercier’s sanitized version of the Old French werewolf lay, he succeeds in creating an accessible, authentic vision of Bisclavret that appeals to a broad cross-section of society, including adults who might not otherwise encounter medieval literature.