Fantastic rides, proud and daring heroine … Rémi Chayé’s superb animated film, again in theaters since May 19, is also a breathtaking western in the form of an initiatory journey. And the inspiring portrayal of a Girl Scout that became a myth.

Four years ago, with his first animated feature film, Tout en haut du monde, Rémi Chayé chose 19th-century Saint Petersburg and then the North Pole as the backdrop for the emancipatory journey of a young girl from the Russian aristocracy. . Its staging exhaled the breath of adventure in colors worthy of Derain or Nicolas de Staël. And his blonde heroine, so intrepid, was enough to make all the Disney princesses pale. Here he is even more conqueror, as he sets this second adventure film in the mythical lands of the West Rush, in the America of 1863, through plains, canyons and forests. From the credits, the music and the landscapes proclaim it as much as the name of its new heroine: we are in a western in cinemaScope! But on a feminine side. And at the height of a child. Since the youth of Calamity Jane remains in part mysterious for historians, the filmmaker and his co-scriptwriters have invented for the future legendary figure an exciting initiatory journey, a founding story.