“Asterix and the Big Fight” Episode One

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Asterix works great in animation. The live action movies have yet to thrill me, but the modern CG cartoons have been lots of fun.

So when Netflix said they were going to air a mini-series in cartoon form, I was intrigued. After the first episode, I’m sold. This show is great. We’ll see how the rest of the series develops, but it’s off to a good enough start that it could turn out to be one of the best small screen adaptations of a comics series to date.

Let’s talk about that first episode now.

The Look and Sound Of It All

The show looks and sounds great. The animation is stylish and yet super friendly. The characters are all round and cute, perfectly in line with Uderzo’s designs without being slavish to them. Besides, Uderzo’s style changed over the 50 years he drew the series, so how could you pick one?

This is animation beyond typical television series styles, if not exactly a $150 million Disney spectacular.

The series takes advantage of the medium with camera angles that bounce all over the place, where appropriate. They don’t get flashy with it, though. There’s none of that over-the-top camera tracking stuff that some early CG animation went too far with Just Because They Could.

The real special effects type stuff happens at the very start of the series, and that’s done in the interests of looking more comic book-y.

The opening scene is a full-on fight between the Village and a huge Roman army. It’s done in a stylized comic book style, complete with frozen moments, overcranked slo-mo, and sound effects integrated into the shots. Credit the Spider-Man animated movies for inspiring that, if I had to guess. It works well in invoking the comic while being its own thing.

A little later, we get a full-blown “Akira” homage when Obelix falls into the potion, sending a shockwave into the Village not unlike a powerful blast that might level Tokyo.

The soundtrack is also great. It sounds and feels like an old-fashioned orchestral score, with all the horns and strings you could ask for. Whether that’s done digitally or with a full orchestra on a sound stage somewhere, I don’t know. It sounds authentic, and that’s all that matters.

There are a couple of pop songs from the 1970s included in this first episode, at a time when the story references it being in the 70s BC. I was a bit less enthused by that, but it fit the story and didn’t take over. It’s not like a desperate play for relevance by inviting the hot pop star of the moment to voice your lead character and sing a bunch of songs in their new movie. (Is that a shot taken at the upcoming Smurfs movie? Maaaaaybe…)

It’s not like the comics didn’t reference contemporary music,either. It had both Rolling Stones and Beatles references, after all.

References and Differences

This first episode starts with a dramatic battle between the Romans and the Village. It’s a great cold open. It feels cinematic. The soundscape is grand. The atmospheric haze is there. The soldiers start off threatening and on-model before things get Asterix-y and the laughs begin. The whole battle is total fan service and it is awesome. Obelix collects stacks of helmets while knocking soldiers into the sky in mechanical fashion. Asterix zips all around knocking them over. Many villagers get their moment to shine in taking care of Roman business.

Then the story flashes back to 78 BC and a time when the Romans hadn’t yet invaded. It’s such a peaceful time that the fence doesn’t encircle the village yet.

Asterix and Obelix are seen as young kids, sharing a birthday, and being the best of friends. Asterix is smart and ready to move into action. Obelix is soft and shy and wants to hide. The Chief agrees to babysit the neighboring village’s son, Cassius Ceramix. He turns out to be a total bully, making life hell for Asterix and Obelix, pre-Magic Potion. This leads to a series of events by which Obelix will fall into the potion and the Druid will discover the recipe for it.

The episode takes guiding principles from “How Obelix Fell Into the Magic Potion When He Was a Little Boy” and adds more drama to it. There’s also better reasoning for why Obelix was there and how he fell. Obviously, Ceramix is an addition to the story to help set up the story as we see it in “Asterix and the Big Fight.“

The topic of the ingredients needed for the Magic Potion somewhat come from the books. Getafix is seen looking for four leaf clovers in the “Big FIght” book when he chances across a five-toed Roman just before the fateful menhir toss. Lobster was established as an ingredient in the very first book, “Asterix the Gaul.” The strawberries are a plot point in the same book. They’re not an actual ingredient, but were used by the Druid to distract his Roman captors at the time.

There’s a scene with Asterix and Obelix in class that closely resembles the classroom seen in “Asterix and the Class Act.”

The cowards didn’t go all the way and borrow this panel from “Asterix and Obelix’s Birthday,” though.

(Yes, that’s a joke.)

I also like the effect that discovering the Magic Potion has on the Village. We quickly see that they’re a group of misfits. Chaos rules the Village as everyone jumps to get their share of the potion so they can do their jobs in half the time, or just have fun with it. Getafix is forced to put limits on its use to only the defense of the Village so that the Village doesn’t tear itself apart.

This makes sense, given how Goscinny and Uderzo portrayed the Village as the series continued. We got to see plenty of flying fish and Village-wise riots. Same result here, just from a different input.

One Plot Point I Need to Mention

Minor spoilers

In the flashback, we see young pudgy shy Obelix carting around a wooden toy dog that he’s named Dogmatix. What a wonderful coincidence that nearly 30 years later he’d find a lookalike dog on the streets of Lutetia and adopt him!

I had a toy not unlike that one when I was a very young boy. It was plastic, but it had a long string attached to it and you could pull it behind you and I think the head bopped as he rolled forward.

I was worried for a moment that the toy Dogmatix was going to be used to show off the extent of Cassius Ceramix’s capacity as a bully. I was worried about seeing a scene in which Ceramix kicks the toy and breaks it into a million pieces.

My heart was broken in advance for young Obelix.

Thank goodness that scene didn’t happen. Toy Dogmatix is never in any real danger, though he does slow down Obelix at one point in a way that changes nothing in the plot. It’s just a pacing thing.

This means we don’t need to update the website DoesTheDogDie with bad news for this series.

Whew.

The English Language Adaptation (And Other Options)

There’s only one English language audio track for the series, while there are separate British English and American English subtitle options. I guess they just add all those extra “U”s for the British edition?

That helps to explain why the Druid is named Getafix still in the audio. The characters all have British accents, so this work was obviously done in Britain with the British audience in mind. As an American, I of course feel smarter watching a television show filled with British accents, so I’m good with it.

Netflix offers a bunch of options when it comes to listening or reading the movie. I thought of watching it in French with English subtitles, but laziness got the better of me. The English voice cast is not a problem spot, so I don’t regret the decision. There are occasions where the lip movements obviously doesn’t match, but those are few and far between.

I accidentally hit the Thai audio track at one point, and the lips never matched, so it could be worse.

The list of languages this series is available in is impressive. I didn’t count, but it looks like almost 30 languages, several with audio descriptions available. It has all the major languages you could think of, plus languages like Basque, Corsican, Czech, Telugu (one of 22 official Indian languages), Catalan and, yes, even Flemish! (As someone with Belgian ancestry, I need to listen to that one for fun…)

Where The Show Made Me Question Everything I Thought I Knew

The one part that still has me questioning myself is the pronunciation of “Toutatis.”

I did a lot of research into that before I started on YouTube with “Page By Page By Toutatis” for obvious reasons. All of my research indicated that the correct pronunciation of it is too-tah-TEES. There is a meteor of the same name, however, which is pronounced “too-TAH-tis,” which is the way I always heard it in my mind when I was reading the book.

It took me a bit of practice to settle on the other way, but now the Netflix series is pronouncing it the way I would have taken in the first place.

Argh! This is one of those times when writing has its definite advantages over making videos…

The Future

I have five more episodes to watch and I can’t wait. Will I be reviewing them, one by one? Maaaaaybe. Will I do a Minute By Minute podcast series recapping the whole series? Definitely not.

I hope the series finds an audience in America here somehow. I also hope it’s popular enough in Europe (where it has to be expected to find an audience) that Netflix brings them back for a second season. I want more, and I say that without having exhausted all the current episodes. It’s just that good.

I hold out a small measure of hope that some small crowd picks up on it and turns into into either a cult classic or a big hit for Netflix USA. Let some clip from the series become a viral TikTok trend. Whatever it takes! Anything can happen!