Ernest & Celestine (2012) on Netflix

PG20121h 20mAdventure Animation Comedy

Celestine is a young mouse who would rather draw than train as a dentist. Above ground she meets Ernest, a starving bear, in a world where bears and rodents fear each other.

Netflix4.4/5
IMDb7.8/1024,662 votes
Rotten Tomatoes98%

Trailer

Watch the trailer on YouTube

Plot summary

Bears live in cities above ground and rodents in one below, in mutual fear and hate. In the rodent city, Celestine lives at an orphanage where the caretaker, the Gray One, tells the children frightening stories about the bears. Celestine doubts them, and she would rather draw than prepare for the dentistry career that awaits every rodent. Her training sends her above ground to collect the teeth that bear cubs lose under their pillows. One night a bear family catches her at it, and she spends the night trapped in a trash can. In the morning a hungry grizzly named Ernest finds her and tries to eat her. She talks her way out by leading him to a candy shop basement, where he can eat his fill.

Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ernest & Celestine (2012)

Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.

For the crowd scenes of police mice, the producer worried about the cost of animating so many figures, so co-director Benjamin Renner invented one collective character, a mass that deforms as it moves, modelled on the creatures in Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.
Ernest & Celestine received widespread acclaim, and the film became the first animated film to win the Magritte Award for Best Film.
The filmmakers worked hard to stay true to Gabrielle Vincent's books because the author had refused all adaptation proposals during her lifetime, finding a proposed British studio version too smooth and impersonal.
The courtroom scenes drew on Je voudrais qu'on m'écoute, a Gabrielle Vincent book about running away that is not part of the Ernest and Celestine series, while the rodents' underground city and the gendarmes' outfits were influenced by Paul Grimault's film The King and the Mockingbird.
Because Daniel Pennac's screenplay brought in characters with no equivalent in Gabrielle Vincent's books, animator Seï had to design around 174 new principal characters for the film.