A Dead Cowboy, A Shiftless Punk, And A Hippie History Teacher Set Off A Surreal Crime Story In First Trailer for Nicolas Pegon’s ‘Flick!’ (EXCLUSIVE)

Popular French comic artist and animator Nicolas Pegon’s debut feature Flick!, was one of the best project pitches we saw at this year’s Cartoon Movie, and we’re excited to exclusively unveil the film’s first full trailer.

Pegon’s film, produced by Wizz and Folivari-owned studio FOST, follows Joy, a 25-year-old drifting through a dead-end existence in rural eastern France. “She’s kind of bored there,” Pegon tells us. “She spends most of her time between depressing jobs at the supermarket. She goes to the bar and lives in an old cabin in the woods.”

Joy’s quiet, aimless routine takes a sharp turn after a strange accident involving a buried gun, a cowboy-looking corpse, and a panicked decision that spirals into increasingly surreal territory. “She comes face to face with a dead body,” Pegon explains. “She fires the gun and realizes that she just shot a cowboy. And although the cowboy was obviously already dead, she looks a bit like a suspect, so she panics.”

Back at the cabin, she shares space with an unlikely accomplice. Didier, her roommate, is “a 50-year-old history teacher… a former hippie,” Pegon says, someone “pretty zen” and largely out of sync with Joy’s restless energy.

From there, the film escalates into a darkly comic drama of failed cover-ups involving a freezer, stolen lime (for the smell), and a half-painted getaway car. “There will never be really a great plan,” Pegon says. “It’s going to be one epic fail after another until eventually they find a radio and end up calling the police directly.”

But beneath the escalating chaos is a more introspective thread. As Joy’s grip on reality loosens, the dead cowboy begins to haunt her. “Reality slowly will blend into fantasy,” Pegon says. “So Joy starts to ask herself a question, a big one. What if… he was her estranged father?”

Wizz producer Claire Madigan frames the story as something more layered than its premise suggests. “That’s the overall synopsis of the story,” she says. “But there are a lot of other themes that are going on here.”

Visually, Flick! stands out immediately, its uniquely colored, comic-like aesthetic being what first caught our eye at Cartoon Movie. Pegon, who comes from a comics background, leans heavily into that influence. “I drew comics myself… and of course, my graphic style is influenced by underground American comics artists,” he says. “That’s probably why you have this strong black line.”

The film’s look intentionally balances stylization and realism. “The intent was to mix the comic aspect with something a bit more realistic, a bit more cinematographic,” Pegon explains. “For the colors… to mix a little bit of a realistic palette with something a bit more pop.”

Madigan adds that this aesthetic is key to the storytelling. “You’re not really sure if you’re seeing what’s happening or if you’re inside one of Joy’s comics,” she says. “That line between real and reality, you don’t really know as the film goes on.”

Music will also play a central role, something Pegon has been eager to explore after working so long in comics. “That’s probably why I wanted to go from comic books to a feature film,” he says. “Music is an important part of my work, but… on comic books, it can be a bit frustrating.”

The soundtrack evolves alongside Joy’s journey. “The first part of the film would probably be more in this punk vibe,” Pegon says. “And in the middle… something more of folk. Just a simple guitar, because of the cowboy character and his guitar.”

Crucially, the music is diegetic. “Every time you’re going to have this guitar atmosphere, you’re going to have the silhouette of the cowboy somewhere in the frame playing the music,” Pegon explains. “The idea is to show that he’s haunting Joy’s life just as he’s haunting the film.”

On the production side, Flick! marks a significant step for the team at Wizz, marking the outfit’s feature debut. Producer Amanda Stubbs describes it as a natural evolution. “We’ve been around for 15, 20 years… and it sort of just feels natural that we’ve arrived at that stage,” she says. “Pegon came with this fantastic idea, and immediately it felt right.”

Stubbs also highlights the importance of working with a highly experienced partner in FOST. “Getting a studio like that on board as co-producers has given us a lot of credibility,” she says. “They have that experience, they have the contacts.”

Even so, the leap into feature production comes with uncertainty. “We had no idea how people were going to react, to be honest,” Madigan says, recalling the days leading up to the Cartoon Movie pitch.

Stubbs echoes that sentiment. “It’s very different in the world that we’ve been working in for the last 15 or so years,” she says. “But it’s so refreshing, and it’s so invigorating.”

For now, the team is focused on financing and development, with an eye toward international partners, including distributors.

Pegon, meanwhile, continues to refine the project while the producers secure the funding. Having already finished a second version of the script, he says the goal now is to finalize the producer lineup so that a third and final version can be penned. “We are already pretty happy, but going to go a step further when the financing is finalized.”

If the trailer is any indication, Flick! is aiming for something tonally unique and visually distinctive, but in a pulpy way that should have tremendous cross-border appeal. The plan is to produce a film that moves freely between deadpan crime farce and something more introspective and uncanny. As Pegon puts it, the goal is not just to tell Joy’s story, but to let her reshape it. “It’s a way for her to tell her story in her own way,” he says.