Studio TF1 is making one of its most significant investments in animated production in recent memory, joining Yes Chef, an original $25 million family comedy set in the high-pressure, fur-flying world of televised pastry competitions.
The ambitious project, announced during the Annecy Animation Film Festival, is being produced by Studio TF1 and director Matthieu Zeller’s Octopolis and nWave Pictures (The Chicken Rabbit and the Dark Hamster). The film is scheduled to be released in 2028.
Based on an original idea by Clara Owen and Mathieu Zeller, “Yes Chef” was written by Lauren Hynek and Elizabeth Martin, whose credits include Disney’s live-action “Mulan” and Skydance Animation’s “Spellbound.” The film will be directed by Annie Carell and Benjamin Mousquet, who also directed “The Chicken Rabbit and the Dark Hamster” and its sequel “The Chicken Rabbit and the Secret of the Groundhog”.
The project is a notable step for Studio TF1 to strengthen its film distribution business in France, leveraging the expertise of animation studio Blue Spirit and its international sales team led by Rodolphe Buet and Alice Damiani. Studio TF1 will therefore release the film theatrically in local theaters and also handle international sales, turning “Yes Chef” into a full-fledged theatrical production that will be developed, produced, distributed in France, and sold worldwide.
“This is a project that Studio TF1 has fully partnered with Mathieu Zeller from the beginning, and we have worked together,” Studio TF1 Film Division Managing Director Nathalie Turza-Madar told Variety in an interview with Zeller during the Annecy Film Festival.
Turza Madar also acknowledged that “no other recent animation project like Yes Chef has seen the studio so fully invested in working with external partners.” “That’s what makes this relationship so strong,” she added, noting that Studio TF1 and Zeller also just collaborated on the comic book-based film “Les Gendarmes.”
“Yes Chef” is animated by nWave Studios, Octopolis, and Blue Spirit, with UMedia as a tax shelter partner.
The move comes at a time when French animation continues to rise above its ranks internationally, driven by a deep talent pool of artists, directors, screenwriters and technicians, despite facing new pressures from AI and changing production models. One of the most notable recent examples is “Minions & Monsters,” the latest installment in Illumination’s $1 billion “Despicable Me” series, co-written and directed by French animator Pierre Coffin. Mr. Zeller, a former senior executive at Studiocanal, also has a track record of delivering affordable European independent animated films that perform well in theaters. The sequel to “Chicken Rabbit,” which he produced, attracted 858,000 viewers in France last year.
“Jesus Chef” (French for “Oui Chef”) revolves around a long-running TV pastry competition hosted by charismatic chef Andre L’Amour in the world of anthropomorphic animals. The contest, which has been on the air for 20 years, features two sets of contestants, including a grandma sheep and her teenage lamb grandson, a deer cousin, twin cat sisters, and other animal bakers.
Behind the scenes is exhausted producer Jeanne Gazelle, who is panicking over declining ratings. With the help of an army of tiny rabbits who operate cameras, lights, and the entire machinery of the studio, she pushes the show toward increasingly grand challenges. Until the stunts become so outrageous that they have little to do with baking. When the competition spirals out of control, the contestants revolt with cries of “No Chef,” withdraw from the show, and return to what Zeller calls the heart of baking: working together, sharing, and the joy of making and eating delicious cakes.
“In that world, this is real comedy,” Zeller said. “The trials are loaded with every comedy and spectacle you can imagine, including flour, eggs, falling meringue, and fur exploding everywhere.”
Zeller said the idea was born out of a convergence of several trends, from the enduring popularity of baking shows to the explosion of baking videos on TikTok and the broader family appeal of food as entertainment.
“We built our belief on the fact that this is a legitimate world for us as French and European creators,” Zeller said. “It’s also something very new and has meaning centered around family bonds, sharing and being together.”
Baking and cooking are “very much a family thing,” he added, so the project was a natural fit for the wide-audience animation work nWave has been creating “to bring kids, parents and grandparents to the movie theater together,” Zeller said.
The film is also designed as a new original IP, rather than an extension of an existing series, a point both Zeller and Toulza Madar emphasized.
“This is obviously a new brand, but one that clearly has IP potential,” Toulza-Madar said. “For now, we are starting with a feature film, but we know this is already a big undertaking and could be developed in many different formats.”
Zeller said theatrical release is central to that strategy. “We have a belief that building an IP starts with a feature film. There are other ways to build an IP, but our belief is that it builds its life through theatrical releases, theatrical events,” he asserted.
“Yes Chef”’s $25 million is in the same budget range as nWave’s recent productions. It’s modest compared to major American studio animation, but ambitious by European standards. Zeller said the film will use nWave’s long-standing 3D animation techniques while continuing to evolve the studio’s visual language. This project also marks a technological change. This is the first nWave film created entirely in the Maya-Houdini pipeline.
Studio TF1 submitted several titles to Cannes this year, including the World War II drama Mulan, directed by Laszlo Nemeth, which was in competition and stars Gilles Lelouch as Jean Moulin, a hero of the French Resistance.
