text: One of the major reason for the manga succes in France is its corollary, the Japanese animation, was prior introduced in the country on public channels, in the late 1970s, early '80s. Unlike other European countries, by this time there were only three French TV channels, both were public and had minor children TV shows. Shonen and Shojo series like UFO Robot Grendizer, Captain Future, Candy Candy and Captain Harlock are iconical of this era. Also, a French-Japanese series thematically inspired by the Greek Odysseus and graphically influenced by Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, Ulysses 31, was soon released in 1981. Such series were enough popular to allow the introduction of licensed products such as tee shirts, toys, stickers, mustard glass, mugs or keshi. Also followed a wave of anime adaptations of European tales by Studio Pierrot and mostly by the Nippon Animation studio, e.g. Johanna Spyri's Heidi (1974), Waldemar Bonsels's Maya the Bee (1975), Hector Malot's Sans Famille (1977), Cécile Aubry's Belle and Sebastian (1980), Selma Lagerlöf's The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1980), or Jules Verne's Around the World with Willy Fog (1983), notable adaptation of American works were Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1980) and Alexander Key's Future Boy Conan. Interesting cases are Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers adapted to Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds (1981) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes become Sherlock Hound (1984), both turned human characters into anthropomorph animals.