How ‘The Stars Aligned’ For Émilie Tronche’s ‘Samuel’ To Reach Netflix Worldwide (Exclusive Trailer)

After becoming an unexpected breakout hit on social media and European public TV, Samuel is finally heading to a global audience, with a Netflix premiere date set for February 5.

Today, only a couple of weeks before the show’s worldwide arrival, we’re exclusively debuting the official English-subtitled trailer for the animated micro-series.

Created, written, and directed by Émilie Tronche, Samuel is a coming-of-age story told through the diary of a 10-year-old boy growing up in the early 2000s. Across 21 short episodes, each under seven minutes, the series captures Samuel’s daily life, anxieties, and complicated feelings for a girl named Julie. The show’s sketchbook black-and-white 2D style and pared-down animation stand in sharp contrast to the emotional depth of its mature storytelling.

The series is produced by Les Valseurs in co-production with French public broadcaster Arte, Pictanovo, Solent, Pikkukala, RTVE, and 3Cat. Originally released online, Samuel quickly gained traction on TikTok and Instagram, where its short format and forthright emotional tone struck a chord with viewers of all ages.

Tronche tells us that the series’s universality was not something she planned from the outset.

“I didn’t know if it was conscious or not at the beginning,” she says. “The first thing that I wanted to do was something for me and also for my family. I wanted my parents and my sisters to like it.”

While the story is clearly set in the early 2000s, she deliberately avoided heavy-handed period signifiers. “I didn’t want it to be too referential. I just wanted to give little hints, to be more universal,” she says. “And I didn’t want it to be something too nostalgic about that time period.”

The project began in 2020 as a solo experiment, just before lockdown, while Tronche was finishing work on a more traditionally produced short film. With a bit of free time and minimal resources, she decided to make something based on her storytelling instincts.

“I decided to do something really, really fast, without too much thinking, without too much production,” she recalls. “That’s why there are no colors, and it’s really simple lines.” She animated alone, recorded all the voices herself for the original French version, and posted the first episodes directly to her Instagram account.

What began as a side project quickly attracted attention from both producers and broadcasters. “I thought it was always going to be something that I was doing on the side,” Tronche says. “I thought producers couldn’t be interested in it because it was too simple.”

Instead, both her producer Les Valseurs and Arte reached out after discovering the series online and at Cartoon Forum. “They asked me, ‘Do you have producers? We want to broadcast this series,’” she recalled. “The stars were aligned at this moment.”

As the audience grew, so did the emotional connection viewers felt to the work. “A lot of people reached out to me to express their feelings about the series,” Tronche said. “I received a lot of fan art, people getting tattoos. I was recognized on the street.” That response surprised her, particularly given how personal and understated the series is.

Although Samuel is told from a child’s perspective, its audience skews heavily adult, a rarity in Europe, where locally produced adult animation hasn’t quite taken off the way it has in the U.S. Tronche attributes that to the fact that she never defined a target demographic. “When I did the series, I didn’t tell myself for whom I was doing it,” she explains. “Everybody was asking us, ‘Is it for children? Is it for adults?’ And we didn’t have the answer.” She added, “Maybe it’s because I never put the series in a box.”

With the Netflix release, Samuel is poised to reach its largest audience yet. Tronche has already confirmed that a second season is in development with Arte, while she continues to explore new projects beyond the series, including her first feature.

For now, the charming little series stands as a rare example of a deeply personal, minimalist animated project that traveled from a single artist’s social feed to a worldwide streaming debut.