Xavier Ramonède

Xavier Ramonède is a French animator and artist, best known for his work on various French films and international co-productions, such as Nocturna and The Illusionist, the French webseries Les Kassos [fr], and his award-winning student film Le Building. Ramonède's artwork has also been featured in multiple publications.

Ramonède hails from Toulouse.^[1] He first became interested in drawing at the age of fourteen, after discovering manga. Over the following two years, he developed a strong passion for animation.^[2] After meeting Romain Grandjean in high school, Ramonède was brought on as an animator and designer on Grandjean's 2002 stop motion short film Abraxas.^[1][3]

Although Ramonède was inspired by Toy Story to pursue a career in computer animation, he changed course to pursue traditional animation after applying to Gobelins, l'École de l'image.^[1] He attended there from 2002 to 2005.^[4][5] In 2004, he created the short student film Récré Fighter,^[6][7] and collaborated with classmates Pierre Perifel, Jun Frederic Violet, and Rémi Zaarour on a second short film, Festival Qualité.^[8][9] The following year, he reteamed with Perifel and Zaarour to create his group thesis film, Le Building, which was also co-directed by Marco Nguyen and Olivier Staphylas. Le Building uses a combination of 2D and 3D animation.^[10] Ramonède colored most of the film's traditional animation and also handled most of its compositing.^[11] Le Building screened at numerous international film festivals and won several awards,^{[12][13][14][15][16]} including Best Undergraduate Animation at the Ottawa International Animation Festival.^[15]

Ramonède has named Bruce Timm,^[2][17] Jamie Hewlett, Milt Kahl, James Baxter, Robert McGinnis,^[2] Mary Blair, and Miroslav Šašek as being among his artistic influences.^[17]

The same year as his graduation from Gobelins (2005), Ramonède received credit as an animator on the short film Imago, directed by Cédric Babouche.^[18] The following year, Ramonède worked as an animator on Everyone's Hero.^[19] Imago afforded Ramonède the opportunity to work with Perifel again, who served as one of the film's supervising animators.^[18] The two further collaborated as animators on Nocturna and The Illusionist.^{[5][20][21][22]}

Other animation credits of Ramonède's include various French films and international co-productions, such as 99 Francs,^[23] Zarafa,^[5][20] Titeuf,^[19][24] and April and the Extraordinary World,^[2][25] as well as the French webseries Les Kassos [fr],^[26][27] and the music video for C2C's song "Delta".^[28] Ramonède has occasionally returned to Gobelins as a teacher and has also worked on various commercials.^[4] A 2013 commercial that he worked on for Deezer uses Mcbess characters and received a Bronze Clio Award.^[29][30] A 2015 project that he worked on, called Hippopolis, was directed by French artist Ugo Gattoni and serves as a companion to a scarf that Gattoni designed.^[31]

Ramonède has been credited as an animator on Ankama's under-development television project Muffin Jack and Jeremy.^[32]

Pin-up art by Ramonède is featured in Volume #1 of Dave Sim and Howard M. Shum's comic book series Gun Fu, which was published by Image Comics in 2005.^[33][34] In 2009, Ramonède contributed to the book Terrible Yellow Eyes, which features artwork inspired by Where the Wild Things Are.^[35][36] Ramonède also created artwork for a proposed art book tie-in to the French board game Color Warz, which in 2016, unsuccessfully sought funding through the French crowdfunding website Ulule [fr].^[37]

Daytime Emmy Award-nominated character designer Chris Battle, who has worked on such shows as The Powerpuff Girls and Dexter's Laboratory,^[38] has expressed admiration for Ramonède's body of work.^[39]

• Xavier Ramonède at IMDb
• Xavier Ramonède on Tictail Archived 2017-09-22 at the Wayback Machine
• Xavier Ramonède on DeviantArt^{[permanent dead link]}
• Xavier Ramonède on Blogspot.com
• Video interview with Xavier Ramonède at Gobelins (April 13, 2016)