Samuel Tourneux

Samuel Tourneux is a French filmmaker born in France in 1973. After studying 3D animation at Supinfocom, Samuel started his career at Buf Animation Studio. For 10 years, he built his career as a special effects and animation supervisor in cinema and advertising. After the success of his short film VACHE FOLLE, Samuel started working as an animation director in advertising.
In 2006, Samuel devoted himself to directing and directed, among other things, episodes of the animated series PAT & STANLEY created by Pierre Coffin.
In 2008, his short film MÊME LES PIGEONS VONT AU PARADIS was nominated for an Oscar in the category of Best Animated Short Film.
Since then, Samuel has been solidly working directing advertisements and short films. He has made many commercials, as well as series, and notably in 2010, he created the 3 short films for the Despicable Me franchise: BANANA, HOME MAKEOVER, ORIENTATION DAY.
In 2013, he created an attraction called “La machine à voyager dans le temps des Lapins crétins” in the French amusement park Futuroscope. The attraction received the award for "Best Attraction in the World" at the 2015 Thea Awards in Los Angeles.
In the past years, Samuel has specialized himself in fiction. He was solicited to make the first season of LEGO CITY ADVENTURE and continued with his first feature film AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS which will be released in France on August 4th, 2021.

Director’s statement
“When I arrived, there was already a first version, in which Passepartout was Phileas's valet, as in Jules Verne's novel. But I didn't want this submissive situation, which comes from another time: I wanted our heroes to be friends, with an equal relationship. We reworked the story structure and characters a lot, together with Gerry Swallow. At the same time, we started graphic studies. Even though the scenario was not yet finalized, we already knew that we would have a lot of sets to cover, and that some could only be approached by trick designs in order not to get bogged down in complicated special effects (water, smoke, and fire). We therefore had to develop a graphic style that would allow us to easily mix 2D and 3D. With our artistic director Mathieu Vavril, who did a sensational job on this film, we quickly understood that we should refine the designs and textures so that the volumes could be interpreted more simply, and therefore blend better with the 2D elements. We preferred to focus on light and color. Mathieu excels in this type of exercise.”