A single hour that treats Hugo's sprawl like a wound instead of a book. The animation doesn't waste time on scenery, it lives in Valjean's face, in the exact moment mercy becomes heavier than revenge. This isn't a summary. It's the thing itself distilled down to what actually matters: one man choosing to break a chain nobody could have forced him to break.

Jean Valjean Monogatari is a 1979 animated TV special that adapts Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables. Rather than covering the whole book, it centers on the story of Jean Valjean and Cosette. The drama runs as a single special in its original form, though the French broadcast divided it into seventeen short episodes.