Why is “Samuel”, the phenomenon series from Arte, such a hit?

A little gem that already has 40 million views on all platforms! Samuela short animated series in 21 episodes, created by Emilie Tronche, tells the daily life of a CM2 schoolboy. Discreetly launched in March on the Arte.tv platform, Samuel, broadcast on Arte this Monday at 8:50 p.m., has already become cult on social networks. Anatomy of success.

A fair portrait of the vicissitudes of childhood

This series depicts the tender and sensitive daily life of Samuel, a CM2 schoolboy about to move on to 6th grade, through his diary, read aloud. “Hi, my name is Samuel, I'm 10 years old and I have a problem. But hey, I don’t really want to talk about it,” he confesses at the start of the series.

“I represented childhood as I knew it, trying to be as sincere as possible. It is perhaps part of the universal themes of those where we can identify with the character”, analyzes Emilie Tronche in the columns of the HuffPost.

Throughout the episodes, Samuel aptly describes the vicissitudes of childhood: his secret love for “big Julie”, his friendship with Corentin, the friend with greasy hair, his hatred of Dimitri, with whom all the girls are in love, because he runs very fast and gets upset, the death of a grandparent or the depression of a parent. Whether you are 10, 20 or 50 years old, this portrait of childhood touches your heart!

Minimalist graphics full of poetry

The black line on a white background of Emilie Tronche, designer, author and voice actor in this series, seems childishly simple. This spare but rhythmic style, which recalls Esther's Notebooks by Riad Sattouf, nevertheless allows all the melancholy, humor and poetry of the series to be conveyed.

« Samuel is in 2D animation, with twelve drawings per second. It had to go quickly, hence this black line on a white background, very simple. This sketch side, a little raw, made it possible to transmit emotion, to say what I wanted with little, for example by playing on the eyes, the looks,” explains the creator in the press kit for the series.

Everything is enhanced by a well-felt original soundtrack where period pieces (Abba, Giorgio Moroder, etc.) and contemporary pieces (L'Impératrice, November Ultra, etc.) intersect. “The Music […] allows Samuel to convey his emotions. It is inseparable from the narrative. Moreover, the quest for musical rights has become a saga in itself,” underlines Emilie Tronche.

These pieces serve up choreographies, often enchanting, already cult on TikTok. “Music and dance were also there immediately because they are omnipresent in my life,” continues the designer. And to explain: “Samuel dances often: when he is happy, when he is desperate, when he does not really know what he feels, when it is too much for him or when he does not have the words. »

An undiluted nostalgia

The series takes place in 2006. Samuel is full of references and winks to millennials: the first flirtations on MSN, the trafficking of Diddl sheets in the playground or even the epidemic of emo bangs caused by Tokio Hotel .

By playing on points of reference common to many of us, Samuel brings back sweet memories of the 2000s without giving in to watered-down nostalgia.

A format adapted to the age of social networks

Samuel has more than 5.5 million views on arte.tv, 7.5 million views on YouTube, more than 13 million views on Instagram (ARTE accounts to follow and ARTEfr) and 14 million views on TikTok, according to figures from Influencia .

The format of the Samuel series is perfectly suited to social networks. “There is not one, but two distinct series,” explains Marianne Levy-Leblond, director of the digital creations unit at Arte France to our colleagues atADN. The first in horizontal format is more of a series that can be watched on YouTube, Instagram and on our platform. The second features snapshots especially visible on TikTok. The idea was to offer capsule episodes which reveal nothing of the plot and which focus on music or dance, in order to respect the codes of the platform. »

The series has generated numerous conversations on social networks, particularly on TikTok with covers of Samuel's choreographies all over the world. On Instagram, the series became the theme of an “inktober” challenge. Samuel's fan community is very active with dedicated Discord servers, fan fiction and theories on the psychology of the characters (and particularly on Bérénice, Samuel's angry classmate, seen as a lesbian preteen who has not still does it coming out).

The series is such a hit that the production studio Les Valseurs offers, on the occasion of the broadcast of the fiction, a pop-up store with merchandising bearing the image of the little heroes of Samuel in the Marais (Paris) until December 21 and an exhibition of unpublished drawings by Emilie Tronche at the Center Pompidou.

Samuel is 21 five-minute episodes, with more to come. The series was adapted in Spain, a graphic novel is being prepared, and Emilie Tronche is not closed to the idea of ​​a season 2: “The age that would interest me would really be a year older late. Compared to the end of the series, I'm thinking of the fourth-fifth, because middle school can be hard,” confides Emilie Troche to Huffpost.