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THE HEART OF COSETTE

Cosette's heart
Fantine e Cosette - The heart of Cosette
Nippon Animation
Original title: Les Misérables - Shojo Cosette
Characters:
Cosette, Fantine, Jean Valjean Sakamaki, Alain, I Thénardier, Azelma Thénardier, Éponine Thénardier, Gavroche Thénardier, Javert, Marius Pontmercy
Author: Victor Hugo
Production: Nippon animation
Country: Japan
Year: 7 January 2007
Broadcast in Italy: March 23, 2010
Gender: Comedy / Drama
Episodes: 52
Duration: 24 minutes
Recommended age: Children from 6 to 12 years old

From March 26, 2012, Italy 1, at 8:00 am broadcasts the new Japanese cartoon "Cosette's heart", produced by Nippon Animation in 1997 is part of the project World Masterpiece Theater and is divided into 52 episodes of about half an hour each. The first episode ever was aired on Fuji TV on January 7, 2007, then also aired by Animax. In Italy it was followed on Hiro in 2010 and now Italia 1 proposes it again. The cartoon is nothing more than the adaptation of the novel "The Miserable" by Victor Hugo, written in 1862 and set from 1815 to 1832, which tells the story of various characters in a Paris after the Restoration.

The story and some episodes
The story is set in France in 1819: Fantine, a 23-year-old widowed woman, decides to sell everything, leave Paris and reach the town of Montfermeil with her 4-year-old daughter Cosette, looking for a job to live on. The Th nardiers, a couple of innkeepers, show interest in taking care of Cosette until her mother finds a job and accommodation. Fantine, a little reassured by the fact that the couple has 2 daughters, ponine and Azelma, believes that Cosette is safe, but she is not, because the innkeepers prove to be bad and ruthless with the little girl who becomes their slave , ending up working for them. Only Gavroche, the Th nardiers' unloved son, whom the little girl has looked after since she was a baby, will become her faithful friend. Meanwhile, Fantine manages to get to Montreuil-sur-Mer and find work in the costume jewelery factory of the town's mayor, Mr. Madeleine, a good and kind man, well liked by everyone, but with a mysterious secret: in reality he is Jean Valjean, who years before had served 17 years in prison in Digne for stealing a little bread in order to feed his family. Helped by Bishop Myriel, from whom he had stolen the silverware, he changes his life, taking with him the secret of his origins. Having become mayor and owner of the factory, he is happy to help Alain, a young man discovered to steal, just like him years before, who will first become his delivery boy and then his close collaborator, even managing to make the factory entrusted to him prosper after Madeleine goes Street.

Cosette's heart
Fantine and the innkeepers - Cosette's heart
Nippon Animation

The events continue telling the life of Cosette, who grows up far from her mother; Fantine sends money to the innkeepers every month, unaware of how her daughter lives, who cannot read the letters he sends her because she is illiterate, but the arrival in the village of the new parish priest gives her hope, in fact, he gives her a hand and it helps her to read and write. Meanwhile, at the factory, it is learned that Fantine has a daughter and is therefore fired. The young mother falls into misery, until she falls ill and dies. Cosette will end up in the convent of the Petit-Picpus for 5 years, where she will be educated by the nuns, but then she will find love with Marius Pontmercy, an enterprising young man who studies law, raised by his maternal grandfather, an old monarchist, and they will marry after long adventures. The whole history is accompanied by events full of social injustices and by the tragic episodes that marked post-Napoleonic France. As it has been deduced, the main character is Cosette. He grows up practically without the company of his mother Fantine, who dies at the age of 27 without being able to see her daughter again. Cosette, after her life as a slave with the Th nardiers, is saved by Jean Valjean, who in turn had helped her mother, and becomes her adoptive father, determined to give her the future that Fantine has always dreamed of for her. At 18 he falls in love with Marius, he will marry him and together they will have a daughter. After the marriage of Cosette and Marius, Jean Valjean will go to stay in a peasant village to spend the last days of his life there. The innkeepers Th nardier, husband and wife, are certainly not a good and dear couple with Cosette, far from it, they are crude, ruthless, greedy and mean to her, with a propensity for deception and fraud; when the inn fails, they fall into misery and are forced to leave for Paris. With them the two daughters, ponine and Azelma; the eldest, ponine, falls in love with Marius, despite knowing that he loves Cosette. At a certain point in her life, tired of her father and everything, she abandons her family and Paris and later dies during the battle of the Corinth inn, saving Marius's life.

Cosette's heart
Cosette as a child
Nippon Animation

Another important figure is Javert, a policeman who as a young man worked in the prison of Toulon, where Jean Valjean, now Medeleine, was imprisoned. When she sees him again she recognizes him immediately and begins a long journey to capture him when he escapes, up to the riots of 1831, when he understands Jean's goodness and retracts his opinions on the matter.
Various settings are the background to the story of "The heart of Cosette".
There was talk of Montfermeil, the French town reached by Fantine and Cosette when they leave Paris. Here is the Sergeant of Waterloo inn, run by the Thénardiers, where Fantine leaves Cosette in their hands at the beginning of the story. The name of the inn comes from an episode that Thénardier recounts every time a guest shows up, when he saved the life of a French general during the battle of Waterloo; so, in memory of this heroic event, he wanted to remember it in the sign. The French general was none other than Colonel Pontmercy, Marius's father, whom Thénardier was robbing on the battlefield, believing he was dealing with a man now dead. The inn will be Cosette's home for 4 long years, despite having to stay there for a short time; it will be Jean Valjean who will save her by taking her away to express the last wish of her mother Fantine, now on the verge of death.
The costume jewelery factory of Montreuil-sur-Mer is also the scene, where Fantine, owned by Jean Valjean, finds work, which makes it prosper, as does Alain later, allowing many people in the town to employ.
The scenes also move to Paris, at the Gorbeau house, a condominium in rather precarious condition that temporarily hosts Jean Valjean and Cosette when they escape from Montfermeil. The same house, a few years later, will become Marius' abode, when he is thrown out of his home for his Bonapartist purposes. It will be right here that the innkeeper Thénardier will also live with his family, who escaped from Montfermeil, after falling into ruin for accumulating too many debts.

Cosette's heart
Fantine the mother of Cosette - The heart of Cosette
Nippon Animation

The convent of the Petit Picpus houses Jean Valjean and Cosette fleeing Javert, the policeman, after being seen in the Gorbeau house. Here, Jean Valjean pretends to be Ultime Fauchelevent, the convent gardener's younger brother, and Cosette in turn pretends to be his daughter, also bearing the surname Fauchelevent.
Still, it is in the house on rue Plumet that Jean Valjean and the housekeeper Toussaints go to live after their stay in the convent. In the courtyard of the villa, Cosette and Marius will meet several times in secret; but the Luxembourg Gardens are their favorite place: it is the park in the center of Paris where they meet for the first time and where Fantine loved to go when Cosette was a little girl of just two years.
At the Musain Café the usual meetings of the "Circolo dell 'ABC" take place, a corporation made up of students, with a republican orientation: here Marius will meet his closest friends, to organize the barricade of rue Saint-Denis in detail during the Parisian revolt. In the riots of June 5, 1832, many rioters died at the hands of the army and only Marius and Jean Valjean were saved from the massacre, miraculously managing to escape through the street of the sewers of Paris.

The first episode of the series begins with a very young Cosette and her mother, Fantine, who are wandering through different cities in France, as Fantine, recently widowed, is desperate for a job. The employers refuse to hire her as they don't want a single mother, so in desperation she is forced to leave Cosette with the Thernadiers, a couple of cruel innkeepers who will soon begin abusing the baby. Meanwhile, Fantine goes to the city of Montreuil-sur-Mer, as she has heard that there are jobs available in a factory there. Monsieur Madeleine, the mayor of the town, is also the owner of the factory, and is really a good-hearted person, as is immediately evident when he stops a boy named Alain chased by the police because he stole a piece of bread to feed his family. In fact, he prevents the young man from being punished for the theft and also gives him and his hungry family a basket full of bread. M. Madeleine, of course, is Jean Valjean, who changed his name and the episode ends with him remembering how he was imprisoned for 19 years just for stealing bread to feed his younger brothers just like Alain.

Cosette's heart
Cosette as a girl
Nippon Animation

Differences with the original novel - The miserable
Victor Hugo's novel, which inspired Cosette's Heart, is one of the best and most popular written in the XNUMXth century; over the years the story has even been shown several times on television and in cinemas. The miserable are practically the characters of low society, fallen into poverty, prostitutes, street men, penniless students. In recounting the stories of these characters, Hugo places them in a historical-social context, accompanying everything with facts of great historical importance, such as the battle of Waterloo, highlighting the opinions on society and its evils.
In addition, the novel was mainly focused on the human story of Jean Valjean and on his story of redemption, which ours will reach at the end of an exhausting journey, where good and evil embodied within each individual collide giving way to an era story.
Although the cartoon remains quite faithful to the book, it does not completely neglect human events, social inequities and the dramatic events of the time; it is based above all on the life of Cosette, an exceptionally good and nice girl who we will get to know well throughout the series, which follows her from adolescence to adulthood.
So the main protagonist is different and some events with rather adult tones are not covered while others have been made less raw and sweeter to ensure that the anime is seen even by the little ones.
Some of the differences between the two sides are as follows.
Alain in the novel is a character who does not exist; again, in "I Miserabili" Gavroche finds death in the barricade, while in the cartoon he is seriously wounded but still manages to save himself; in the novel, Javert commits suicide, instead in "The heart of Cosette" he becomes a new man, reborn, and will know the good qualities of Jean Valjean, his old enemy; while in the book Madame Thénardier dies locked up in prison, in the Japanese cartoon, she comes out of prison, now lost and with the signs of detention, and returns to the town of Montfermeil with her daughter Azelma, where she ran the inn with her husband, and here they start a new new life; her husband instead leaves for America and becomes a slave boy (in the novel he is not arrested).
Furthermore, in the first episodes of the cartoon, the presence of a puppy has been added, or Chouchou, a stray dog ​​who together with Gavroche Thénardier (a male child little loved by the pair of perfidious innkeepers) will be Cosette's only true friend during the period in which will live at the inn.
The cartoon also shows some inaccuracies: in one of the 52 episodes, exactly in episode 20, set in 1829, we talk about the fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" by Hans Christian Andersen, which was published much later, in 1836 and is therefore impossible that the characters already knew her.

Cosette's heart
Cosette's heart
Nippon Animation

Technical features
The heart of cosette is a series well done also from a technical point of view, the drawings are made completely in 2d in Japanese manga style, in fact, unlike the previous World Masterpiece Theater works, the characters are less realistic, and the style is more expressive and emphasized, with huge eyes and faces of some characters with oriental features.
The strong point are in any case the backgrounds, carefully reconstructed down to the smallest details, with a careful study of the environments of the time.

Soundtrack and voice actors
In the soundtrack of the Italian edition the music has remained the same, the sung part in Japanese language is missing (text by Yuki Saito and music by Megumi Ishikawa), replaced by the text "Il cuore di Cosette" by Graziella Caliandro set to music by Valeriano Chiaravalle and played by Roberta Pagnetti. The Italian dialogues were handled by Luca Sandri, Paola D'Accardi, Vittoria Ponticelli and Bruno Gazzetta, while the direction of the dubbing is by Lisa Mazzotti. Cosette was voiced by Elisabetta Spinelli, Fantine by Daniela Fava, Jean Valjean by Pietro Ubaldi, Marius by Patrizio Prata, the innkeepers Th nardier by Lorenzo Scattorin for her husband and by Stefania Patruno for his wife, Gavroche by Patrizia Mottola, Javert by Oliviero Corbetta, Azelma from Tosawi Piovani and Alain from Stefano Pozzi.

Cosette's Heart is copyright Nippon Animation. All rights reserved.


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