Asterix and Cleopatra (1968)

Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo take directing credit on this second Asterix feature, a 1968 Belgian-French production that arrives with noticeably finer animation than its predecessor and a score that flirts openly with the musical. The plot is a wager: Cleopatra promises Caesar a palace in Alexandria within three months, and the Gauls arrive with a magic potion to make the deadline survivable. The satire is gentle and the surrealism is abundant. A singing lion. Santa Claus carved into a pyramid wall. This is a children's comedy that trusts its audience to keep up.

Cleopatra commands the screen with genuine authority, dismissing Caesar's contempt for her people and winning her bet on schedule. That is historical characterization, not a thesis. Her defense of Egyptian capability reads as national pride, and the film attaches no modern racial framework to it. The workers' strike, meanwhile, is not a labor uprising. Amonbofis manufactures it as sabotage, and then the potion dissolves the grievance altogether. Obelix's girth supplies running gags and nothing else. No interior life exists here for a body-positive reading to attach itself to, and no character is coded as neurodivergent, environmentally anxious, or romantically outside convention.

This leaves a brisk adventure with three songs and a great deal of slapstick. The film lectures nobody. It has no interest in instructing its audience about how to live, which in 1968 was simply how family entertainment worked. Viewed from the present, it is a curiosity: technically ambitious, ideologically quiet, and entirely content to let a queen be competent without announcing it.