Imagina que pudieras conocer a tu madre del pasado, cuando tenía tu edad...
Fabricar cosas juntas, compartir ilusiones y temores, hornear juntas una tarta de cumpleaños... navegar por el lago en la misma Zodiac...
Eso les pasa a Nelly y a su "Pequeña mamá" Marion en esta película tan tierna y tan otoñal... nada de violencia, sólo que van a operar a la pequeña Marion, pero su hija del futuro disipa toda incertidumbre...
Os dejo con la banda sonora y con los conmovedores pósters... y con un par de resúmenes
This guy is FRENCH and has a far darker story (if you thought Jean Mineur was dark, you OUGHT to read THIS post!)
For starters, I have been to France but NEVER LIVED there, so I got to learn about this guy from Karambolage (just like Jean Mineur!)
Banania is an instant cocoa drink, Nesquik's main rival. The ingredients are all of them very tropical: chocolate powder, cane sugar, and the special ingredient: banana or plantain starch (hence the name!).
The mascot was originally this Afro-Caribbean girl, quite similar to Chiquita Banana...
But the World Wars changed that, and she was replaced by the Banania Man, a Senegalese soldier (Senegal was a French colony at the time):
Look at that innocent yet ominous smile, "half devil and half child" to quote Rudyard Kipling. And at that uniform: the red fez because he's a Muslim, French blue jacket, and puffy white trousers perfect for the bush, a tropical environment. Instead of saying "c'est bon" in Standard European French, he says "y a bon" in his own regional dialect.
Thousands of men like him were sent to the Western Front, a completely different world, along with TRAINLOADS of Banania powder for the whole French army's breakfast (and it got eaten by bugs and rats too, of course). The Senegalese men and those from other tropical colonies (like Afro-Caribbean and Vietnamese soldiers) were used as a human shield for the European French men and put on the frontlines to be massacres during the warm seasons, the rationale being that, hailing from tropical climates, they would not survive the European winter!
No one mourns these men from across the seas. Their names never appear on those memorials for those "slain for France," crowned by Gallic roosters. Yet their memory survives, for instance, in the form of the Banania Man. Although he is pretty racist, he has been reclaimed as a symbol by the Senegalese immigrants that live within the Hexagon (European France). Like Jean Mineur, he is scary to some people but reassuring to others, even to collectors of his merchandise!
Even ARSÈNE LUPIN had a Senegalese servant that went by "Y a bon," which was most likely a nickname - yes, he has become a literary character!
The modern-day iteration of the Banania Man has less racist features...
His lips have become far thinner and his skin a little fairer, and his smile far more charming, and the "y a bon" in regional accent is gone, but he's still black and still wears the trademark Islamic fez. I'm so glad this brand does not exist in Spain and I would rather take my chances with Nesquik!
After all, there's NOTHING racist about a brown rabbit!
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PS! SAY GOODBYE TO UNCLE BEN AND TO CHIQUITA BANANA!
The Banania Man and the Sarotti Moor are not the only politically incorrect mascots to have been rebranded.
Uncle Ben, a staple of my childhood summers in Sweden, is now also gone forever. Requiem for a reassuring bald black guy who always reminded me of Sam L. Jackson, the Mace Windu of my childhood. The brand is now the 100 percent Uncle-free Ben's Original!
And Chiquita Banana also got axed!
Which makes me wonder: within half a century, will the Wizarding World and Middle-Earth also be sacrificed on the altar of the Politically Correct Gods? Will Dudley Dursley (pre-dementor's kiss) no longer be "the size and weight of a young killer whale," but simply "enormous" (like Augustus Gloop or Aunt Sponge)? Will hobbits nevermore smoke pipeweed? And what about the Haradrim? It would be sacrilege to alter all of that...
Not long ago, I watched a Karambolage episode on YouTube that taught me a lot more on a character I had only hitherto seen on social media. I had been to France more than once, but never watched a cinema show there, so obviously I knew nothing of Jean Mineur and all his lore before this:
With his rosy skin and nutbrown hair, he cannot be any more French. His name, Jean, calls to mind for instance Jean Valjean, it is like Jack, Juan, Gianni, Ivan, or Sean, the average male character of that nationality. His outfit and trademark ice pick as well as his surname mark him as a (child) miner from the Pas-de-Calais, the mining region in northern France (like Asturias, Cornwall, or Dalecarlia/Dalarna). Yet mineur means both miner and minor, someone who is underage, bringing child labour to mind.
Jean Mineur has appeared since the interbellum period on the silver screen, in both France and the Benelux countries, always before the cinema show and right after the trailers (except for a short hiatus in the 1980s). To some epic, dramatic music by René Cloërec, the little Northern French miner throws his ice pick at the centre of a target marked 1000, the number becoming 0001, the last digits of Mediavision's phone number in Paris (and also those of the real Jean Mineur in Heaven: his gravestone says EDEN 0001!).
But where did Jean Mineur come from?
Like Frankenstein, the character is named after his creator, a real-life publicist who came to Paris from the Pas-de-Calais. Created in the 1920s as a pretty ugly black-and-white middle-aged adult, to pay tribute to the real-life Jean Mineur's northern ancestry.
After the World War, the character got his rebranding as a technicolour child in 2D, wearing the outfit of a Pas-de-Calais miner, to make a more positive image and appeal more to children (but now being Jean the Minor, and unfortunately evoking child labour).
Following his 1980s retirement, Jean Mineur returned to the cinemas in the 90s, as a 3D/CGI character (at a time when CGI was something very rare, the purlieu of vanguard studios like Pixar or DreamWorks!). Some French people find him cute or kawaii, others find him scary and even have a phobia of the character, in spite of all the merchandise (Jean Mineur dolls, plushies, keychains, etc: you name it). Mediavision even gives the annual Mineur d'Or (Golden Mineur), a golden statuette of Jean Mineur as award for Best Cinematic Advertising!
The character has also advertised a great deal of products and services on the silver screen (from soft drinks to spectacles/glasses to gasoline) and rubbed elbows with many French celebrities in his ads. Only before Star Wars films does he don a completely different outfit, a padawan's braid, Jedi kimono, and lightsaber, and become Jean Padawan. He has no other cosplay outfit, whether as a Hogwarts student (he would be a Gryffindor), a hobbit, or in any other fandom.
