Le petit Nicolas is the creation of screenwriter Rene Goscinny (1926-1977) and cartoonist Jean-Jacques Sempé (1932-2022). He is the central character of the book series ‘The Adventures of Little Nicola’, an innocent and cute little boy living with his family and friends in an (unspecified) French town in the 1950s and 1960s.
The stories were published in the period 1956-1964, first in the Belgian newspaper Le Mystique and later (from 1959) in the French Sud Ouest and Pilot.
The characters
The main characters that appear repeatedly in the adventures of little Nicolas are:
Nicolas: the main character of the series, a rambunctious but good little boy.
Alceste: the chubby friend who eats a little too much; he is Nicolas’ best friend.
Jofrois: he has a wealthy father, who gets him expensive gifts; he sometimes behaves selfishly towards his friends.
Clotaire: the last student in the class, constantly getting detention from the teacher.
Eudes: the strong one in the class, who likes to give punches.
Joachim: he is good at playing with marbles.
Agnan: the nerd of the class and the only one who wears glasses, the teacher’s pet.
Maixent: has long and stinky legs and runs very fast. In the 2009 film, he’s the only kid who doesn’t appear.
Rufus: has a policeman father and takes his father’s profession very seriously. He has a police whistle.
In Greek, his adventures were first published in the magazine “Children’s Edification”, only there Nicholas was called “Pippinos” and all the names were Hellenized.
In the creative writing workshop for children at the 1st Primary School of Papagos in Athens, after reading some of the adventures, we decided to make this trailer for “The Adventures of Little Nicolas”, designing a script based on short sketches featuring some of the main characters.
We really had fun!
