The Twelve Tasks of Asterix (1976)

The Twelve Tasks of Asterix arrives from 1976, the third animated outing for Goscinny and Uderzo's Gauls and the first built on an original screenplay by the creators themselves. Caesar, weary of Senate gossip that the village of indomitable Gauls might be divine, sets twelve labours in the manner of Hercules. Asterix and Obelix outrun a Greek champion, out-eat a Belgian cook, resist the sirens of the Isle of Pleasure, and finally outlast a Roman bureaucracy so labyrinthine that the sequence became a byword for administrative despair in three countries. It is a comedy of cunning, and it has aged into a cult item on the strength of that one permit office alone.

We searched this film for contemporary social consciousness and found the shelves bare. The satire aims at officialdom, at clerks who send you to another window, at the pomposity of empire. It is political in the oldest sense and progressive in none of the newer ones. The sirens exist to test male resolve and are dispatched by Obelix's appetite for wild boar. Cleopatra drifts past in retirement, a footnote. Obelix's bulk is a running gag and a tactical advantage, never a lesson about self-acceptance. No character pauses to explain the moral of the scene.

The final reel has Asterix admit that none of it matters because they are drawings in a cartoon, which is either the most honest ending in the series or the laziest, and we have decided it is the former. Nothing here preaches. Nothing here lectures. The film asks only that we laugh at a man requesting a permit that does not exist. A clean specimen. Zero across the board.