As happens with father and son, professor and student (as Freud teaches), so happened to us who were in opposition. Italian animation flourished, requiring the creation of an ASIFA Italy. You were the Italian representative to the ASIFA Board, but you deferred to the group who organized the Lucca Festival, so Bozzetto, Cavandoli, Giannini, Luzzati and Manuli didn't feel represented. I met you in Milan during one of your lightning visits, and pleaded with you to be our representative, and speak on our behalf. You considered it for a few weeks, then said that you felt it would be unfair. So at Zagreb in 1980 it was you and I (as I was the delegate for ASIFA Italy), who collaborated on the selection of an international director. There were days of dispute and bickering, luckily none between you and I. Finally both of us were elected, and the first thing that you did was to unfold a little trick of a meeting of the board. We were on opposite sides, but nothing had changed between us.

The last time I saw you, you were in Rome, in September 1985, when I came to do some work that had nothing to do with animation. You came with me to Fiumicino airport when I returned to Milan. Above Fiumicino rumbled an awful storm; you were in good humor and didn't seem to me to look bad.

Two weeks later you phoned me, begging me to come to you since you had books and graphics you wanted to give me. I knew perfectly what you wanted to say, but health problems (my own), family matters and work forced me to decline. I'll regret that forever.

When you died in December, I was doing a residency in Berlin. That was when I had just begun writing furiously on my history of animation, which would appear in 1988 under the title Cartoons, then in French in 1991 and English in 1994, enlarged and corrected. I dedicated the English edition to my teacher Robert Edmonds. I wanted to dedicate the 1988 version to your memory. But I didn't. I was still too timid, and confused. This letter also aims to remedy that.

Giannalberto Bendazzi is a Milan-based film historian and critic whose history of animation, Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation, is published in the U.S. by Indiana University Press and in the U.K. by John Libbey. His other books on animation include Topoline e poi (1978), Due voite l'oceana (1983) and Il movimento creato (1993, with Guido Michelone).