Wakfu: “Goultard the Barbarian”

Wakfu is a French fantasy cartoon that I know nothing about, except that the first few times I saw its name written I thought it was a typo of "waifu." Before looking at the first couple episodes of the show though, I've been told to watch a ten minute special called "Goultard le Barbare."

As an aside before I begin, this seems to be an almost unbelievably obscure special for an otherwise popular show. The Wakfu wiki only has a stub for it, and only if you search for the French title. Wikipedia lists several OVA's and specials alongside every episode of the show proper, but not this one. Not a mention of it anywhere on the page. Google searches barely gave me anything, and the few hits I did get were all in French. And it's not like this is a new release that hasn't been translated yet; the link I was sent to watch it at leads to a 2011 upload.

I don't even know which season of Wakfu this short was for. It's nowhere on the English internet as far as I can tell.

So, let's have a look at this mystery special of a show I know nothing about.


A narrator informs us that Goultard the Barbarian is thought of by most as a demon and monster rather than a man. However, nothing is ever truly that simple, and the story of how he came to be is little known. Cue a panicked little kid in an ill-fitting loincloth running back toward his village calling for help.

This semi-chibi N64 looking visual style isn't what I was expecting. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but not this.

It's a curiously modern-looking highway he's running along, given the much more primitive village and archaic clothing of its inhabitants. Is this a post-apocalyptic fantasy thing? The highway is in awfully good repair for that.

The kid reaches his mother in the crowded village marketplace, and tells her that a bunch of other kids went into the forest. He told them not to, but they shrugged him off (while bullying him) and went into the woods anyway, led by Goultard. Upon hearing Goultard's name, a butcher drops the basket of fresh cuts she was carrying and runs over to try and get a search party going. The townsfolk aren't interested; if a group of kids have been in the forest for this long already, then they're just not coming back.

Those are some nasty woods. And some sexist townsfolk I guess, though that's a smaller problem.

She screams out Goultard's name om anguish, as the camera zooms out to the woods where a group of children are playing. The youngest of them, who looks like some kind of monkey hybrid, is smashing frogs to death and putting them in his mouth.

I'm guessing this one is Goultard, given the barbarity.

The kids start talking about what game they should play next, when a huge, fanged bull-goat creature emerges from the undergrowth and advances on them menacingly. The kids freeze up in fear, realizing too wait that the dangerous woods actually are dangerous. The minotaur-thing grabs one child, and...

...oh, okay. That one is Goultard. The red hair should have clued me in before, heh. I was thrown off by him looking more feminine in the opening shot of him.

In a display of literally Herculean strength, Babby Goultard beasts the attacker senseless and throws it all the way back to the village, where it dies upon impact.

Goultard's mother or older sister or whoever she is, now named as Cabotine, is relieved when Goultard and the others return safely in the wake of the dead minotaur. The village elder who seems to be in charge of the place, however, is less than amused. The minotaurs are deadly raiders and pillagers, and this one appears to have been the son of their chief, Kritur. The minotaurs will surely raze their village and murder them to the last for having done this.

They dispose of the body by feeding it to some other nearby monsters, but they fear that that won't throw Kritur off for long. They need to show him that they bear no responsibility for what happened to his son. So, they're exiling Goultard from the village. And his single mother too, for trying to defend him by reminding the townsfolk that Goultard also saved the other kids.

I wonder what would happen if they just said "no." Do these people have the means to evict them, if Goultard were to turn his superhuman strength against them?

The elder looks awfully smug as he makes this pronouncement. I get the impression he had a prior grudge against this family.

Cabotine and her son leave the village with their few possessions on their backs, the former shouting back over her shoulder that the "lop god" will punish the town for what it's doing. Wonder what "lop" means in this context? Maybe its the name of this region, or ethnic group, or something.

Before they get far, they are approached on the road by another minotaur. This one is much bigger, more richly dressed and armed, and is regarding them with fury rather than hunger. I'm guessing this is Kritur himself, come to avenge his son.

Cut back to the town square, where the villagers are arguing over whether or not exiling them was really neccessary. Jerkass elder insists that it was, of course. The conversation is cut short when Kritur falls out of the sky after being hurled by Goultard just like his son before him. The minotaur chief starts to get up, but then Goultard leaps over the town walls after him, lands on the minotaur's body, and starts punching.

Each blow keeps Kritur stunned just long enough for Goultard to land the next. The child keeps punching until well after sundown, when Kritur finally dies.

Well, if he could take that much punishment before going down for good, I can understand why the people were so afraid of him. Fortunately, Goultard had superhuman stamina and tirelessness to go with the strength.

This time, Goultard is hailed as a hero, well able to protect the village from any consequences his actions might otherwise incur, and a means of finally striking back against the monsters of the world around them. A legend in its early days.

Also, it looked like that elder might have been crushed to death when Kritur landed on him. That also may be helping.

The narrator speaks over a montage of Goultard learning to use weapons, killing monsters, etc, explaining how he grew into one of the mightiest heroes ever who restored peace to a monster-filled and war-torn land. He also caught the eye of a cute broomstick-riding witch, who he married and had children with. It was looking like a happy early retirement for Goultard, after a career well done.

The rage that he always used to summon to empower him in battle remained asleep, seemingly forever, now that he'd retired to a peaceful domestic life. However, it wasn't too many years before a creepy, many-armed monster who we aren't given a good look at finds his home.

Goultard returns home one evening to find a note from "Katar" stuck to his door with a dagger. The note explains that Katar has stuffed Goultard's family into a refrigerator, and he'll only let them out if Goultard fights him at the place of Katar's choosing. Included are a set of coordinates, which Goultard makes haste toward across a cutesy worldmap with silly sound effects.

Bit of a tonal mismatch there, but not too bad.

Goultard reaches Katar's lair in a secluded little ruin. The latter, who appears to be a lanky, goblin-like creature whose black cloak can form itself into extra limbs, is delighted to see him. He promises that Goultard's family are in no danger at the moment (that sounds ominous), but that he's not getting them back until he gives Katar the challenging duel he seeks.

Cue battle. The animation isn't great, of course, but the direction is so good that it barely makes a difference. I'm able to follow every movement, every bit of ebb and flow even when the characters are moving at super speed. Nothing that they do looks like it's just for show. Every blow landed changes the fight going forward. The metal-ish fight music is also really on point.

If you paired this direction with a bigger animation team and budget, holy shit you could get something incredible.

Things go in Goultard's favor at first. Once he's drawn Katar's blood though, Katar displays new powers, apparently being able to form his own blood into powerful tentacle-like appendages after he's been wounded.

The increasingly frenzied and close duel eventually breaks down one of the crumbling old walls, and Goultard sees a refrigerator behind it. His wife and children are indeed inside of it. However, regardless of who wins the battle, it's clear that they're not going to be coming out again.

Cliched. It's a less irritating example than some, of course. It's not like Barbara Gordon inexplicably losing all of her caution, reflexes, and toughness the instant a villain decides to damsel her; Katar is overwhelmingly powerful enough that even a powerful witch really wouldn't stand much of a chance against him. But still. Villain kills wife and kids offscreen to motivate male hero. Tacky.

Anyway, seeing the contents of the refrigerator makes Goultard's battle rage return to him in a way that it hasn't in many years, perhaps more strongly then ever. The battle escalates to DBZ style superheroics, with the landscape being cratered and torn apart under the raging Goultard's blows. Katar keeps getting stronger too as he takes damage, but not enough.

Finally, Goultard stands over Katar's broken, barely gasping body, and demands to know why he did this. Katar says, in a quiet, fearful whisper, that it's because "he feeds himself on anger."

"He." Not "me." Katar hasn't spoken in the third person before now.

Uh oh.

A massive, shapeless demon covered in tentacles and eyes erupts out of the battered Katar's throat and seizes Goultard. Even all of his raging strength is useless against a spirit.

It forces Goultard's mouth open, and pours itself down his throat, turning his skin the same pattern of blacks and grays as Katar's.

So, basically the plot of the first Diablo game. This whole thing was a test to make sure he had found the best possible host for himself, both stronger and with greater capacity for rage than the previous one.

Katar (or...is his name actually Katar? Is Katar the demon, or its previous host?) whispers a relieved, exultant moan about how he's finally free again. Goultard (who may or may not be "Katar" now) unceremoniously kills him.

Today, years later, Goultard the Cursed rules over a land of corpses, ash, and ruin, all that remains of the country he once saved. Waiting for his chance to rise up again and lay waste to all the rest of existence as well.

The narrator laughs fiendishly we fade to black and the end credits start to roll. I'm interpreting this to mean that the narrator is actually the possessing demon, gloatingly telling the story of how it came by its invincible host body.


The opening was sort of misleading, with its talk about how Goultard is a morally gray individual and so forth. He isn't, really. He's a hero who's been bodyjacked by a demon. Granted, the narrator who told us that may be that very demon himself, so he could have just been fucking with the audience.

Anyway, it's hardly original, and the murdered family got an eye-roll out of me. The direction and cinematography are excellent though, and Goultard and (most of) the supporting cast were charismatic enough in both writing and voice acting (special mention to the VA's for Cabotine and Katar) to rise above the cliche. Wakfu seems like a potentially interesting show.