Aya of Yop City : Film Review

Produced by The Rabbi’s Cat team of Joann Sfar and Antoine Delesvaux, the film shares a similar hand-drawn, ornately colorful aesthetic, making a convincing jump from page to screen without losing the rich texture of the original six-part series (published between 2005 and 2010). Yet it tends to suffer from the same haphazard narrative structure as Cat, linking together several plot strands from different volumes instead of building a single story arc with a strong enough emotional pull.

Still, there’s much to feast one’s eyes and ears on here, as we watch aspiring doctor Aya (Aissa Maiga) deal with the mishaps of her extended network of friends and family, all of whom live in the shoddy township of Yopougon in the late '70s.

Though Aya narrates most of the action, two of the film’s major storylines actually involve her BFFs Bintou (Tella Kpomahou) and Adjoua (Tatiana Rojo), both of whom dream of marrying a rich guy and opening their own beauty salons. Unfortunately, Adjoua gets knocked up by a mysterious beau and decides to pin it on Moussa (Jacky Ido), the shiftless son of a wealthy brewery magnate, hoping to secure her family’s future in the process. Meanwhile Bintou starts an affair with a flashy Ivorian expat, who she thinks will whisk her away to the finer parts of Paris (she doesn’t yet know what Belleville is).

While they don’t necessarily build into a cohesive whole, Aya’s stories do offer up a telling commentary on the social barriers faced by her community, as the Ivory Coast slowly evolves into a postcolonial capitalist state. These moments are best revealed by several overtly tacky TV commercials from the epoch that Abouet and Oubrerie intercut with the drama, as well as by a subplot involving Aya’s father (also voiced by Jacky Ido), who works for the local beer magnate (Pascal N’Zoni) and his crumbling empire.