Once Upon a Time... Life is an educational animated television series created and directed by Albert Barillé. It is the third series in the Once Upon a Time... franchise. It reprises the main characters from its predecessors, Once Upon a Time... Man and Once Upon a Time... Space, and adapts them into a physiology context, talking about the human body and its functions in a simplified and educational way. The series consists of 26 episodes. The series was produced by French studio Procidis in co-production with FR3 and Canal+ (France), Société Radio-Canada (Canada), Televisión Española (TVE, Spain), Katholieke Radio Omroep (KRO, Netherlands), Radio Télévision Suisse Romande and Radiotelevisione della Svizzera Italiana (Switzerland), Radio-télévision belge de la Communauté française and Belgische Radio en Televisie Nederlandse Uitzendingen (RTBF and BRT, Belgium), and Eiken (Japan) who was the one who made the animation. The series premiered in France on Canal+, between 13 September 1987 and 13 March 1988, and it was subsequently broadcast on the channels of the rest of the broadcasters that participated in the production dubbed into their own language. This is the second collaboration between Procidis and the Japanese studio Eiken subsequent to Once Upon a Time... Space and is thus, considered as an anime.

Overview

Once Upon a Time... Life brought back the edutainment formula that has Once Upon a Time... Man but that had been left out on Once Upon a Time... Space. The series combined entertaining story lines with factual information, presented metaphorically. The series used the same recurring lead characters as the other series in the Once Upon a Time... franchise: certain represent the cells that make up the body's systems and defense mechanisms, such as red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets, while antagonists represent viruses and bacteria that threaten to attack the human body. Every episode of the series featured a different organ or system within the human body (like the brain, the heart, the circulatory system, etc.). In addition to its countries of origin, the series was also aired in the Arab states of the Persian Gulf, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, Gabon, Germany, Greece, Haiti, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Liechtenstein, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, the Soviet Union, Senegal, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Venezuela, Yugoslavia, and Zimbabwe.

Music

The opening theme song of the serie is "L'hymne à la vie" (French for "hymn for life") composed by Michel Legrand. It is performed in the original French-language version of the series by Sandra Kim, winner of the Eurovision Song Contest 1986. In the English-language dub, its lyrics were translated and was retitled as "This life is life that's life".

Characters

The series makes use of recurring human characters originally from both Once Upon a Time... Man and Once Upon a Time... Space. Every character in the series appeared as a real person (the old intelligent doctor, the dedicated blonde mother, the boy and the girl, their obese friend, and the pair of bullies) and anthropomorphic representations of cells and cellular functions within the human body. The series describes a "society inside the body" with a strong pyramidal stratification of work.

Episodes

Regional home-video releases

In some English-language versions, the title is rendered as "Once Upon a Time – Life" in the opening credits. A partwork version called How My Body Works was produced for the United Kingdom in 50 hardback volumes, each with about 30 A4-sized pages, described as "an Orbis play & learn collection". In it, some of the characters have different names: The Professor for the Maestro; Captain Courageous and Ace for the lymphocyte B crafts' pilots; Plasmus and Globina for Hemo and Globin, Corpo for Jumbo; Toxicus, Germus and Infectius for the bacterium characters; Virulus for the virus character. VHS copies of the English-language television episodes were included with issues. A DVD box set of all the episodes of the series was produced by Procidis, and distributed locally by various distributors. The DVD series was produced in French, English, Polish, Finnish, German, Italian, Hebrew, Norwegian, Hungarian, Dutch and Swedish, but was not released in the United Kingdom. In 2011, the DVD box set was available in English in Canada, distributed by Imavision.

Biological accuracy

Most biological terminology is translated with care, but a few mistakes were made and there are some anachronisms.