Joann Sfar

Joann Sfar is a French film director, screenwriter, producer, actor, and writer

Sfar was born on August 28, 1971, in Nice to a Jewish family (half Sephardic, half Ashkenazi), where he was raised from childhood on fairy tales, myths, and legends. As soon as he learned to hold a pencil, he began drawing. From the age of 15, he started sending his comics to publishers every month, but they rejected his work just as regularly. Around the same time, he discovered his “heroes”: Fred, Baudoin, and Pierre Dubois (a variation on the Little Musketeer theme). “They put sensible ideas into my head. Everything I do is for their pleasure.” At the beginning of the 1980s, after receiving top honors in philosophy to please his father, he entered the Paris Academy of Fine Arts, where he attended morphology courses while drawing truly dead still lifes, such as two-headed children and other monsters from the Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire collection at the Natural History Museum. He attended autopsy procedures with a forensic pathologist friend and drew internal organs. Eventually, he realized that nothing is more wonderful than drawing a living, clothed being walking down the street. At 23, there was a pleasant surprise. Within one month, the publishers Dargaud, Delcourt, and Association sent interested replies to his letters. Since then, he has never stopped working. “Comics are addictive, but they also demand a great deal of effort. And as Charlier said, it is easier to tell ten stories than one single one.” This resulted in an abundance of worlds, held together by a very personal cocktail of emotion, humor, and intelligence, without forgetting the graphic charm that brings one crashing down to earth. The result: working alone or with collaborators, Sfar has written more than 150 albums in 10 years, several novels, and has made several animated films and a music video for Tom Fersen, which won the Grand Prize in 2006 at the Annecy International Animation Festival. That same year, he received the Eisner Award for the comic “The Rabbi’s Cat,” which he later adapted for the screen. In addition, he heads the comics division for children and adults at Gallimard Jeunesse, nicknamed Bayou.