Synopsis

At the end of the world, on a cozy farm perched at the top of a hill, Tom lives with his loving foster parents: the calm and wise ex-sailor Ferdinand and the high-spirited African Juliette. Their neighbors own a small country zoo and Tom is best friends with their daughter Lili. When her parents go on a short trip, they entrust their daughter and the animals to Tom's family. The children are thrilled, but the frog elder soon warns them that they are in grave danger: the frogs predict 40 days of continuous rain. The wind starts blowing and black clouds start gathering. This is the start of an incredible adventure filled with hardship and misery. Raining Cats and Frogs is a masterpiece that took 6 years to complete: two years writing, 36 months of production - eight to ten seconds of film per day - and one year in post production. The dedicated work of over 200 people is the first feature length film made by the Folimage studio, founded on a meager budget by Jacques-Rémy Girerd and his fellow enthusiasts. Director's note "We could never have imagined we would achieve so much either technically or artistically. Such an ambitious project had not been attempted in France since Paul Grimault's The King and the Bird. We had to reinvent everything. It was a great joy, but I must confess things sometimes got tough [...]. For me, the toughest thing was never to lose the vital thread of the plot, to retain its initial freshness and always stay at a safe distance from the film so as to remain clear-sighted." Jacques-Rémy Girerd

Jacques Rémy-Girerd

Jacques-Rémy Girerd (1952) studied at the Lyon L'école des Beaux-Arts. He worked as a high school professor and teacher at the Grenoble Art School. In 1984 he and a small group of enthusiasts founded the Folimage studio in Valence, which he continues to run to this day. His first animated film "Quatre mille images fœtales" in 1978 was followed by a decade of creating short stop-motion animations until the 1989 films "Amerlock" and the César-winning Best Animated Film "Le petit cirque de toutes les couleurs". After the birth of his first child in 1988 he focused mainly on directing cartoons for children and started several educational children's series for television: "Le bonheur de la vie", "Mine de rien", "Ma petite planète chérie". In 1997 he creates his featurette "L'enfant au grelot", which became hugely popular in the cinemas. Afterwards he embarked on his first full-lenght feature "La prophétie des grenouilles". "Mia et le Migou" is his second feature film.

 Selected awards:  Award for Best Animated Feature (Abitibi - Témiscamingue, Canada),  Audience Award (Mon Premiere Festival Paris)

Selected festival history: Toronto IFF, Buenos Aires IFF, Shanghai IFF, Annecy