Studio TF1 Makes Major Animation Play With ‘Yes Chef,’ $25 Million Family Feature About an Animal Pastry Competition…

Studio TF1 is making one of its most significant investments in animated features in recent memory, boarding “Yes Chef,” an original $25 million family comedy set inside the high-pressure, fur-flying world of a televised pastry competition.

The ambitious project, unveiled during the Annecy Animation Film Festival, is being produced by Studio TF1 and Matthieu Zeller’s Octopolis and nWave Pictures (“Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness”). The film is expected to be released in 2028.

Based on an original idea by Clara Oheyen and Matthieu Zeller, “Yes Chef” is written by Lauren Hynek and Elizabeth Martin, whose credits include Disney’s live-action “Mulan” and Skydance Animation’s “Spellbound.” Annie Carrel and Benjamin Mousquet, who previously worked on “Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness” and its sequel, “Chickenhare and the Secret of the Groundhog,” are directing.

The project marks a notable step for Studio TF1 as it builds up its film distribution operation in France while also leaning on the expertise of its animation studio Blue Spirit and its international sales team, led by Rodolphe Buet and Alice Damiani. As such, Studio TF1 will roll out the film theatrically in local cinemas, on top pf handling international sales, making “Yes Chef” a full-scale play across development, production, French distribution and global sales.

“It’s a project on which Studio TF1 has fully partnered with Matthieu Zeller from the very beginning and we’ve been working hand in hand,” Nathalie Toulza Madar, the managing director of Studio TF1’s film division, told Variety in an interview alongside Zeller during the Annecy festival.

Toulza Madar also confirmed “there isn’t another recent animated project like ‘Yes Chef,’ where the studio is investing so fully alongside an outside partner.” “That’s what makes this association quite strong,” she added, noting that Studio TF1 and Zeller also just collaborated on “Les Gendarmes,” a comicbook-based film.

The animation on “Yes Chef” is being handled by nWave Studios, Octopolis and Blue Spirit, while UMedia is on board as tax shelter partner.

The move comes at a time when French animation continues to punch above its weight internationally, driven by a deep talent pool of artists, directors, writers and technicians, even as the sector faces new pressures from AI and shifting production models. One of the most visible recent examples is “Minions & Monsters,” the latest installment in Illumination’s billion-dollar “Despicable Me” franchise, which was co-written and directed by French animator, Pierre Coffin. Zeller, a former high-ranking executive at Studiocanal, also has a track record in delivering reasonably budgeted indie European animation movies that work well in theaters. The “Chickenhare” sequel which he produced drew 858,000 admissions in France last year.

“Yes Chef” — “Oui Chef” in French — unfolds in an anthropomorphic animal world around a long-running TV pastry contest hosted by charismatic chef André Lamour. The competition, which has been on the air for 20 years, brings together duos of contestants, including a grandmother sheep and her teenage lamb grandson, deer cousins, twin cat sisters and other animal bakers.

Behind the scenes is Jeanne Gazelle, a frazzled producer panicking over declining ratings. With the help of an army of small rabbits operating cameras, lights and the entire studio machinery, she pushes the show toward increasingly spectacular challenges — until the stunts become so outrageous that they barely have anything to do with baking anymore. As the competition spins out of control, the contestants rebel with a cry of “No Chef,” taking back the show and returning it to what Zeller describes as the heart of baking: working together, sharing something, and taking pleasure in making and eating a good cake.

“It’s a real comedy in that world,” Zeller said. “The trials pile up with all the comedy and spectacle you can imagine — flour, eggs, falling meringues, fur exploding everywhere.”

Zeller said the idea grew out of several converging trends, from the enduring popularity of baking shows to the explosion of baking videos on TikTok and the broader family appeal of food as entertainment.

“We built our conviction around the fact that this is a universe where we are legitimate as French and European creators,” Zeller said. “It’s also something that is quite new, and it carries meaning — around family bonds, sharing and being together.”

He added that baking and cooking are “very much a family thing,” which made the project fit naturally with the kind of broad-audience animated features nWave has been making, “to bring children, parents and grandparents together in a movie theater,” Zeller said.

The film is also designed as a new original IP, rather than an extension of an existing franchise — a point that both Zeller and Toulza Madar emphasized.

“It’s clearly a new brand, but one that very clearly has IP potential,” Toulza Madar said. “For now, we are starting with the feature film, which is already a big endeavor, knowing that it has the potential to be developed in different formats.”

Zeller said the theatrical release is central to that strategy. “We have the conviction that building IP begins with the feature film. There are other ways to build IP, but our belief is that it is through the theatrical release, through the theatrical event, that you build its life,” he argued.

At $25 million, “Yes Chef” sits in the same budget range as nWave’s recent features: modest compared with major U.S. studio animation, but ambitious by European standards. Zeller said the film will use the 3D animation techniques nWave has long practiced, while continuing to evolve the studio’s visual language. The project will also mark a technical shift: it will be the first nWave film made entirely with a Maya-Houdini pipeline.

Studio TF1 was at Cannes this year with several titles, including László Nemes’ World War II drama “Moulin,” which played in competition and stars Gilles Lellouche as French Resistance hero Jean Moulin.