Jacques Demy

Donkey Skin

Donkey Skin

In this lovingly crafted, wildly eccentric adaptation of a classic French fairy tale, Jacques Demy casts Catherine Deneuve as a princess who must go into hiding as a scullery maid in order to fend off an unwanted marriage proposal—from her own father, the king (Jean Marais). A topsy-turvy riches-to-rags fable with songs by Michel Legrand, Donkey Skin creates a tactile fantasy world that’s perched on the border between the earnest and the satiric, and features Delphine Seyrig in a delicious supporting role as a fashionable fairy godmother.

Film Info

  • France
  • 1970
  • 90 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • French
  • Spine #718

Special Features

  • New 2K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • French television interview from 1970 with director Jacques Demy and actors Catherine Deneuve, Jean Marais, and Jacques Perrin on the set of the film
  • “Donkey Skin” Illustrated, a 2008 program on the many versions of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale
  • “Donkey Skin” and the Thinkers, a 2008 program on the themes of the film, featuring critic Camille Tabouley
  • Audio Q&A with Demy from the American Film Institute in 1971
  • New English subtitle translation

Available In

Collector's Set

The Essential Jacques Demy

The Essential Jacques Demy

Blu-ray Box Set

6 Discs

$99.96

Special Features

  • New 2K digital restoration, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • French television interview from 1970 with director Jacques Demy and actors Catherine Deneuve, Jean Marais, and Jacques Perrin on the set of the film
  • “Donkey Skin” Illustrated, a 2008 program on the many versions of Charles Perrault’s fairy tale
  • “Donkey Skin” and the Thinkers, a 2008 program on the themes of the film, featuring critic Camille Tabouley
  • Audio Q&A with Demy from the American Film Institute in 1971
  • New English subtitle translation
Donkey Skin
Cast
Catherine Deneuve
The first queen/The princess
Jean Marais
The first king
Delphine Seyrig
The Lilac Fairy
Jacques Perrin
The prince
Micheline Presle
The red queen
Fernand Ledoux
The red king
Henri Crémieux
The doctor
Sacha Pitoëff
The prime minister
Credits
Director
Jacques Demy
Written by
Jacques Demy
Original music by
Michel Legrand
Cinematographer
Ghislain Cloquet
Set designs by
Jim Léon
Art direction
Jacques Dugied
Editor
Anne-Marie Cotret
Costume designers
Augusto Pace
Costume designers
Gitt Magrini
Sound
André Hervée
Producer
Mag Bodard

Current

Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment
Jacques Demy and Nantes: The Roots of Enchantment

A friend and longtime scholar of Jacques Demy ruminates on the great director’s career, as well as the port hometown they shared—which would become a magical movie location.

By Jean-Pierre Berthomé

Donkey Skin: Demy’s Fairy-Tale Worlds
Donkey Skin: Demy’s Fairy-Tale Worlds

Jacques Demy’s first full-fledged storybook fantasy challenges and subverts traditional fairy-tale norms.

By Anne E. Duggan

Anna Biller Celebrates Jacques Demy’s Candy-Colored Darkness

Under the Influence

Anna Biller Celebrates Jacques Demy’s Candy-Colored Darkness

The director of The Love Witch talks about French master Jacques Demy, whose mix of candy-colored imagery and psychological darkness has made a lasting impact on her filmmaking approach.

Demy Monde
Demy Monde
Film scholar James Quandt created a nearly hour-long visual essay for our new collector’s set The Essential Jacques Demy. Titled Jacques Demy, A to Z, it elaborates on twenty-six concepts important to understanding the cinema of this singular filmm…
Fairy-Tale Demy in Toronto

Repertory Picks

Fairy-Tale Demy in Toronto

Jacques Demy made his return to France after a stint in Hollywood with this Jean Cocteau–inspired vehicle for Catherine Deneuve, screening at Toronto’s Royal Cinema next week.

Happily Ever After?
Happily Ever After?
The glittering surfaces of classic fairy tales often mask undercurrents of emotional torment, spiritual foreboding, and moral transgression. This week, our latest series on the Criterion Channel, Happily Ever After?, showcases the deviant forces lurk…

Explore

Catherine Deneuve

Actor

Catherine Deneuve
Catherine Deneuve

One of cinema’s great beauties, Catherine Deneuve (born Catherine Dorléac in Paris in 1943) is also an icon of the transformative cinematic 1960s. The daughter of two actors and the sister of three (one of whom, Françoise Dorléac, died in a car crash in 1967), Deneuve has acting in her blood. After her major breakthrough in Jacques Demy’s poignant 1964 musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Deneuve continued to prove she was more than just a pretty face in Roman Polanski’s thriller Repulsion and Luis Buñuel’s surreal erotic daydream Belle de jour. Those films may exploit Deneuve’s crystalline loveliness for its seeming inscrutability, but her portrayals of sexual repression in both (and her shocking embodiment of schizophrenia in the former) make for two of the most vivid performances of the era. Those roles set her on the path to becoming a full-fledged movie star, and she went on to act for François Truffaut, Alain Cavalier, Marco Ferreri, and Jean-Pierre Melville. Her performances have grown richer as she’s aged; today, she is a true grand dame of the cinema, and her compellingly enigmatic looks—once interpreted as fragile—have taken on a mature imperiousness, as evidenced in such films as Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (in which she costars with her daughter with Marcello Mastroianni, Chiara Mastroianni).