The sly, gentle humour of the books and the elegance of Jean-Jacques Sempe’s illustrations have given way to a literal-minded, sometimes leaden alignment of scenes that are more or less comic, according to taste.

Still, it’s hard to see the film – a hit on home turf since its October 1 release – failing to do good business in territories outside France, although North America may be an exception.

Director Laurent Tirard, assisted by co-writers Alain Chabat and Gregoire Vigneron, and advised by Anne Goscinny, daughter of Nicolas’ creator, Rene Goscinny, has strung together a series of episodes drawn from the books and formed them into a plot of sorts.

Misinterpreting a conversation between his parents (Valerie Lemercier, Kad Merad) to mean that he is shortly to have a little brother, Nicolas (Maxime Godart) fears the prospect of being upstaged and possibly even abandoned in favour of the newcomer. He recruits his school chums to carry out a plan to avert this unwelcome competition.

Little Nicolas faithfully reproduces the prim, decorous world of suburban France in the post-war years – pre-Beatles, pre-pill, pre-immigration – portrayed in the books and seen in other nostalgia-tinged movies such as The Fabulous Destiny Of Amelie Poulain and The Chorus (to which the movie refers in a brief appearance by Gerard Jugnot). The film is no funnier than it has to be. Schoolkids by the hundreds of thousands will probably love it. The parents they bring, curious to see what the filmmakers have made of the books they themselves read, may have mixed feelings.

Goscinny’s anarchic 7-year-olds have morphed into a group of mildly larky, gauche 10-year-olds, and while the movie has its moments, the spark of fantasy that would have made it full-throttle funny is mostly missing.
Sadly, the actions and dialogue by the central character have no real wit or bite, so that when in a closing voiceover Nicolas says his ambition in life is “to make people laugh,” it is hard to imagine him succeeding.