Code Lyoko


Code Lyoko is a French anime-influenced animated series created by Thomas Romain and Tania Palumbo and produced by Antefilms Production and MoonScoop for Cartoon Network, France 3 and Canal J, with the participation of Conseil Général de la Charente, Pôle Image Magelis, Région Poitou-Charentes and Wallimage. The series centers around a group of teenagers who travel to the virtual world of Lyoko to battle against X.A.N.A., a hostile artificial intelligence which seeks to attack the real world. The scenes in the real world employ traditional animation with hand-painted backgrounds, while the scenes in Lyoko are presented in 3D CGI animation. The series began its first 97-episode run on September 3, 2003, on France's France 3, and ended on November 10, 2007, and on Cartoon Network in the United States on April 19, 2004, and ended in 2008 after its final seven episodes aired online at Cartoon Network video.
A follow-up series, Code Lyoko: Evolution, which used live action footage rather than hand-drawn animation to represent the real world, began airing in 2012. The series only consisted of one season of 26 episodes with the final episode airing in late 2013, leaving off on a cliffhanger with no second season or other sequel series planned due to MoonScoop's filing for bankruptcy shortly after in 2014.

Plot

Jeremy Belpois, an 8th grade prodigy attending boarding school at Kadic Academy, discovers a quantum supercomputer in an abandoned factory near his school. Upon activating it, he discovers a virtual world called Lyoko, consisting of four separate environments known as "sectors", and inhabited by an artificially intelligent girl named Aelita. He also finds out about X.A.N.A., a fully autonomous, malevolent, and highly intelligent multi-agent system, that also dwells within the Supercomputer. Using structures on Lyoko known as Towers to gain access to the real world, X.A.N.A. can possess electronics, living beings, and other targets like a virus to wreak havoc. X.A.N.A. is determined to eliminate anyone aware of the Supercomputer's existence to achieve freedom to conquer Earth and destroy humanity.
In Season 1, Jeremy works tirelessly to materialize Aelita into the real world and stop attacks caused by X.A.N.A., being aided by his three friends, Odd Della Robbia, Ulrich Stern, and Yumi Ishiyama, collectively known as the Lyoko Warriors, whom he virtualizes into Lyoko through devices known as scanners. They achieve this by escorting Aelita to various Towers on Lyoko, all while under attack from hostile, X.A.N.A.-controlled programs known as monsters. Once a Tower is deactivated by Aelita, Jeremy can launch the "Return to the Past" program, which sends the world back in time to undo any damage caused by X.A.N.A., while anyone scanned into the Supercomputer retains their memory of the events. In the episode "Code: Earth," Aelita is finally materialized, but the group discovers that X.A.N.A. had planted a virus inside of her which will kill her if the Supercomputer is turned off. They realize that they cannot destroy X.A.N.A. without destroying Aelita in the process.
In Season 2, Aelita adjusts to life in the real world, while Jeremy attempts to develop an antivirus program to liberate her from X.A.N.A.'s influence. On Lyoko, a fifth sector is discovered and the group explores more of Lyoko's secrets and mysteries. The gang begins to uncover information about a mysterious man named Franz Hopper, the supposed creator of the Supercomputer, Lyoko, and X.A.N.A. who went missing ten years ago. Eventually it is discovered that Hopper is indeed alive somewhere, hiding in the uncharted parts of Lyoko to avoid X.A.N.A. All the while, X.A.N.A. attempts to steal the Keys to Lyoko, lines of code which it can use to flee the confines of the Supercomputer into the internet, from Aelita's memory. At the end of the season, the group discovers that Aelita is actually human and the biological daughter of Hopper, and rather than being infected with a virus, is instead missing some fragment of herself. In "The Key," X.A.N.A. tricks them with an imposter, thus succeeding in stealing Aelita's memory and escaping the Supercomputer. Aelita appears to perish as a result but is revived when Hopper restores her completely, along with her missing fragment: the memories of her life on Earth before she was virtualized on Lyoko.
In Season 3, X.A.N.A., no longer bound to the Supercomputer, seeks to destroy Lyoko by erasing each of its four surface sectors, until only Sector Five remains. Initially reluctant, the Lyoko Warriors decide to invite fellow Kadic student William Dunbar as the sixth member. Shortly after being virtualized, however, he is possessed by X.A.N.A. and proceeds to destroy the Core of Lyoko, destroying the virtual world and rendering the group unable to fight X.A.N.A., endangering the entire real world. After what they thought was their defeat, Jeremy receives a coded message from Hopper, which contains knowledge necessary for rebuilding Lyoko.
In Season 4, Jeremy and Aelita finish reconstructing Lyoko, and construct a digital submarine known as the Skidbladnir to travel across the Digital Sea to destroy X.A.N.A.'s "Replikas," copies of Lyoko's sectors linked to X.A.N.A.-controlled supercomputers on Earth, all created for its goal of world domination. X.A.N.A. uses William as a weapon throughout the season to defend the Replikas and target the Lyoko Warriors. To prevent suspicion regarding William's disappearance, Jeremy manages to program a specter to take William's place at Kadic, although its seemingly unintelligent behavior confuses teachers and students alike. Near the end of the season, X.A.N.A. decides to draw energy from all of its Replikas to create the Kolossus, a gigantic monster which later destroys the Skidbladnir. After eventually being released from X.A.N.A.'s control thanks to Jeremy's efforts, William has a difficult time regaining the trust of the group. While Ulrich defeats the Kolossus, Hopper sacrifices himself to power Jeremy's "anti-X.A.N.A. program," which destroys X.A.N.A. forever upon activation. Shortly after, the group, albeit reluctant due to their nostalgia, decides to shut down the Supercomputer.

Characters

Lyoko Warriors

  • Jeremy Belpois
  • Aelita Schaeffer
  • Odd Della Robbia
  • Ulrich Stern
  • Yumi Ishiyama
  • '''William Dunbar'''

    Villains

  • X.A.N.A.
  • '''The Lyoko Monsters'''

    Recurring characters

  • Elisabeth "Sissi" Delmas
  • Herb Pichon
  • Nicolas Poliakoff
  • Jean-Pierre Delmas
  • Jim Morales
  • Suzanne Hertz
  • Milly Solovieff and Tamiya Diop
  • Hiroki Ishiyama
  • '''Takeho and Akiko Ishiyama'''

    Supporting characters

  • Waldo Franz Schaeffer
  • Yolanda Perraudin
  • Samantha "Sam" Knight
  • Johnny Cleary
  • '''Anthea Hopper-Schaeffer'''

    Development

Origins

Code Lyoko originates from the film short Les enfants font leur cinéma, directed by Thomas Romain and produced by a group of students from Parisian visual arts school Gobelins School of the Image. Romain worked with Tania Palumbo, Stanislas Brunet, and Jerome Cottray to create the film, which was screened at the 2000 Annecy International Animated Film Festival. French animation company Antefilms took interest in the film due to its atmosphere and offered Romain and Palumbo a contract to turn it into a series. This led to the development of the pilot, Garage Kids.
Garage Kids was produced in 2001 by Antefilms. The project was created by Palumbo, Romain, and Carlo de Boutiny and developed by Anne de Galard. Its producers were Eric Garnet, Nicolas Atlan, Benoît di Sabatino, and Christophe di Sabatino.
Similar to its succeeding show Code Lyoko, Garage Kids was originally envisioned as a 26-episode miniseries detailing the lives of four French boarding school students who discover the secret of the virtual world of Xanadu; created by a research group headed by a character known as the "Professor". The pilot featured both traditional animation and CGI. The Matrix had "enormous influence" on the pilot according to Romain, citing the concept of a machine allowing the characters to dive in a virtual world, an operator who supervises the trip and the correlation between the action in the real world and the virtual world. Anime also served as inspiration, specifically Serial Experiments Lain for its "worrying digital dimension" and Neon Genesis Evangelion for its dangerous entities to fight. While similarities to Tron have been noted, Romain admitted to not having seen the film yet when the series was being developed.
When the concept on the virtual world was added, Antefilms suggested animating it with CGI to help make the series unique, promote a video game theme and make the separation between the virtual and real worlds clearer. While incorporating it, Palumbo and Romain wanted to avoid making the series "too playful and superficial" and sought to "get around the censoring done by TV channels that tend to soften youth programs" by writing episodes "with tension, suspense, even tragic scenes. Things that are hard to imagine seeing in a cartoon series for kids."
A team of artists were recruited in order to give the backgrounds of the real world a realistic appearance. The factory and boarding schools specifically were modelled after locations in France. The factory was based on a Renault production plant in Boulogne-Billancourt, which has since been demolished. The school, Kadic Academy, is based on Lycée Lakanal in Sceaux, which Romain had attended. Palumbo and Romain were adamant on keeping the locales based on "the France we knew", as they wanted to avoid what they perceived as "fantastical" or "Americanized" locations other French cartoons used at the time.
Scripting for the series officially began in January 2002, with Frédéric Lenoir, Françoise Charpiat, and Laurent Turner being brought on as writers. It was around then when Aelita was added, who at this point was an AI who lived on the virtual world. When choosing a director, the team wanted "a new generation" to be in charge of the series. Jérôme Mouscadet was hired in June 2002 after having dinner with a friend who worked at Antefilms. While Mouscadet had experience with animation from directing short films at a small company, he never directed a series before. One of his first major contributions was to drop the idea of the characters retaining their powers in the real world, which he decided after wanting to further separate the virtual world from the real world. Progress was slow over the summer of 2002, which Mouscadet attributed to the series' head writer " a lot of vacation". Antefilms reached out to Sophie Decroisette as a replacement, who had recently been a writer for Malo Korrigan and was on a break after giving birth to her first child. Decroisette described this stage of writing as expanding the concept and finding strong motivations for the characters. On Garage Kids' pilot, she said: "I really just saw a teaser that was focusing on imageshere were great ideas in the images, notably the transition from one universe to the other, but plot-wise, it was just "they travel from one universe to the other", with no explanation on "how" and "why". They had no real motivation, they were fighting X.A.N.A., which was represented as black spheres, something like this, but none of this was clearly defined. Our job, with the other writers, was to try to introduce "scientific accuracy"". The writers struggled the most with finding a motivation for Jeremy. Charpiat suggested during a meeting that he want to bring Aelita onto Earth, which became the basis for the first season. Another concept emerged from Lenoir in the form of a time travel mechanism to explain how X.A.N.A. could cause massive damage to Earth, with other people witnessing the destruction, and have the heroes fix it without people becoming suspicious. This eventually turned into the Supercomputer's "Return to the Past" function.
Networks were hesitant to Garage Kids due to its serial nature, as they feared it would alienate potential viewers who missed the first episodes and they wanted to rerun the series without worrying about episode order. This lead the writing team to shift to a more episodic format. Romain ultimately chose to leave the series after this change in 2003 to work on the French-Japanese anime series Ōban Star-Racers. Tania Palumbo remained on the series through its conclusion as creative director. She designed and named the main characters, with Jeremy being named after one of her and Romain's classmates at Gobelins. The series' human character designs were primarily influenced by Japanese animator Kōji Morimoto's style.
After the series was sold to France 3 and Canal J, producers felt "Garage Kids" was too unclear for a title and requested it be renamed. Palumbo and production manager Anne de Galard ultimately settled on "Code Lyoko", with Lyoko originating from the Japanese word "旅行" meaning "travel" to further emphasis the dive into the virtual world. The virtual world was subsequently renamed "Lyoko" as well.