Prima Linea Productions

Prima Linea Productions was a French animation and film production company founded in Paris in 1995 by producers Valérie Schermann and Christophe Jankovic. It emerged from Prima Linea, the graphic agency Schermann established in 1988 to represent illustrators, graphic artists and comic authors. The production company developed animated features, short films and commissioned work, with a particular emphasis on auteur filmmaking, literary adaptation and traditional hand-drawn animation.

Its activities combined original development and film production with graphic research, visual concept design, storyboarding and animation fabrication. Art direction, pre-production and post-production supervision supported a filmmaking approach shaped by individual directors and distinctive visual styles. The company worked across French and international theatrical animation, including international co-productions.

Films and creative development

Its feature output began with Loulou et autres loups in 2003, followed by Serge Élissalde and Grégoire Solotareff’s U in 2006. The black-and-white anthology Peur(s) du noir brought together filmmakers and graphic artists including Blutch, Charles Burns, Lorenzo Mattotti and Richard McGuire. Later productions included Zarafa and Éric Omond’s Loulou, l’incroyable secret.

For Michael Dudok de Wit’s The Red Turtle, released in 2016, Prima Linea handled the complete European animation fabrication and participated in a co-production involving Studio Ghibli and Wild Bunch. Its final feature, Lorenzo Mattotti’s The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily, was released in 2019 and selected for Cannes’ Un Certain Regard programme. Short-form work included Jean-Christophe Lie’s L’Homme à la Gordini and Laurent Kircher’s Grand Slam Ovalie.

Company history

The company established an animation fabrication operation in Angoulême in 2003. In December 2015, that workshop became the separate technical animation company 3.0 Studio. Prima Linea Productions continued developing and producing original films.

Financial difficulties following The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily led to insolvency. The Paris commercial court placed Prima Linea Productions into judicial liquidation on February 5, 2020, and the company ceased operations.