The beautiful Amalfi Coast, site of the Cartoons on the Bay Festival.

The Lay of the Land
Everyone here seems to roll downhill; cartoonists and journalists, television executives and school kids, fishermen and German tourists, all eyeing warily the long trek up the steep mountainside to their abodes. Nearby sit the tents of the festival under a sodden sky, looking for all the world like an endurance test for large gray Glad bags.

It's an odd meeting of worlds. A fishing village turned tourist haven, an impossible stack of terraced houses and hotels meeting the flat calm Mediterranean. Such an atmosphere breeds long and languorous chats in the bars that front the short beach at Positano. Producers, instead of talking about the economics of co-production, discuss the artistic collaboration that it impliesAh, Italy.

And over all this hangs a war. It is perhaps hard to understand how close the war in Serbia and Kosovo is to Italy until you see the children's animations created at a frenetic pace in the few days of the festival by local school kids. There were soldiers transforming into missiles, then flowers; refugees and bombers; fire and destroyed homes; a cat threatening a family of mice. It was the children who kept their eyes on the real world as the elite of the animation world settled into their seaside working vacation.

Here, the animation industry becomes a village, febrile but functional. People listen. Life and business mix here in a way that few other festivals or conferences can claim.

The Apple of Yer RAI
Cartoons by the Bay was created by RAI, the state television network of Italy, as a way to promote domestic production of animation and co-production. In the three years since its inception, RAI's three broadcast channels have added a series of new cable channels, including several channels in a new satellite network RAISAT, with several digital channels oriented solely to educational audiences, and RAI Ragazzi (RAI kids) for home viewing

The results of an intensive commitment to domestic production are only now starting to bear fruit, and RAI made the most of its sponsorship of this event by announcing a series of new productions to feed the Italian (and international) animation pipeline. These included:

A series of 75 spots entitled "Cartoons with the Best Intentions," a co-production with the United Nations Office for Project Services. These are 70 didactic commercials promoting such themes as environmental awareness, energy conservation, participatory democracy, immigration problems and domestic safety. Despite the banal-sounding themes, there are quite a number of radical approaches to the subjects. Italian masters Bruno Bozzetto, Giuseppe Laganà and Guido Manuli were among the directors, but some wonderful expressionistic spots on the environment were also contributed by Maurizio Forestieri and Graphilm.