Sometimes a handful of lines is enough to bring back an emotion we thought we had forgotten. An averted glance, a silence in the schoolyard, a song stuck in your head: with Samuel, Émilie Tronche draws childhood without making it prettier than it was. She captures its awkwardness, small cruelties and enormous feelings. What moves me most is how little she needs to do it. The drawing looks almost fragile, yet it knows exactly where to go.
Five Days to Find a Voice
Before Samuel, Émilie Tronche trained as an animator. She studied at Atelier de Sèvres and then at the animation school in Angoulême, making Tour de main during her studies. She later contributed to En sortant de l’école, adapting a poem by Verlaine. After months spent on that production, she used available studio time and equipment to try something different: a small film, made alone in five days in 2020. A ten-year-old boy tells the story of his life in the first person. His name is Samuel. Nothing yet suggests how far this experiment will travel.
That tight deadline is more than a production anecdote. It encourages her to draw quickly, preserve the energy of the first gesture and resist polishing away every imperfection. Samuel needs no elaborate world to feel real: his voice, his diary and a few gestures are enough. Tronche posts the film on Instagram and Facebook, followed by three more episodes. Viewers respond, recognizing something of themselves in this slightly lost child, and the project begins to grow.
Childhood Without a Nostalgic Filter
Samuel is ten. He has a crush on Julie, spends his days with his friend Corentin, finds Bérénice irritating and tries to make sense of his own feelings. Told from an adult perspective, these stories can sound tiny. To a child, they take up the entire world. A shaky friendship, a misunderstood word or an unspoken declaration can feel momentous. The series captures that imbalance with rare precision: it never mocks Samuel’s feelings, but treats them seriously.
There are also the details of a particular era: gelled hair, Diddl stationery and songs instantly tied to a memory. But Samuel is more than a box of nostalgia. Its universal appeal comes from Tronche’s observation of how children relate to one another, struggle to express themselves and contradict their own feelings. We laugh at a situation, then suddenly recognize an old hurt. Beneath the apparent simplicity, the writing is remarkably subtle.
When Movement Speaks as Clearly as Words
For Émilie Tronche, drawing and movement are inseparable. She is fascinated by bodies, posture and especially dance. She has described filming herself to find her characters’ gestures, as though she needed to feel a scene physically before drawing it. You can sense this on screen: a hesitant walk, a waving arm or a brief dance can say as much as a line of dialogue. Samuel’s animation retains a precious spontaneity, even after production becomes a team effort. The line stays light and the rhythm alive.
When producer Damien Megherbi discovers the early films online, he offers to develop the series with Les Valseurs. An animation team forms, and Arte joins the project. The series arrives on Arte’s platforms in 2024, with shorter formats designed for Instagram and TikTok too. What might have lost its charm as it expanded keeps its identity. The drawings do not try to compete with the most elaborate productions; they preserve the feeling of a private notebook suddenly coming to life.
The success quickly reaches beyond animation enthusiasts. Teenagers and young adults lip-sync dialogues on TikTok, reenact scenes and share memories of their own. More than 25 million views are reported within two months. The series also travels beyond France, including to Spain, with adaptations that account for local cultural references. There is something beautiful about such a specific story reaching people of different ages and languages: Samuel’s everyday world is precise, but the emotions he experiences know few borders.
From Animated Diary to Paper: Letting Bérénice Speak
In May 2025, Le Journal de Samuel is published by Arte Éditions and Casterman. Moving from screen to page is more than changing formats: it gives these confessions a different kind of time. We can linger over a drawing, return to a sentence and look at a face again. The world then opens further with L’été de Bérénice, announced for October 2026, which gives a voice to the girl Samuel often viewed from the outside. The perspective shifts, as though revealing that every supporting character carries an entire world of their own.
Perhaps that is Émilie Tronche’s greatest strength: she does not force a grand lesson about childhood onto her audience. She listens to her characters, allows them to be awkward and trusts the power of a drawn gesture. Samuel reminds us that a story does not need to be spectacular to matter. Sometimes a notebook, a voice and a few sincere lines are enough to awaken something we have kept deep inside.
