Luca Raffaelli, Cartoombria Director, and Pierluigi De Mas, ASIFA Italia President. Photo courtesy of Chiara Magri.

As if organizing an animation festival in Italy is not difficult enough, this year Cartoombria, which ran from November 27 to 29, also had to deal with the threat of earthquakes which hit the Umbria area for more than a month.

But not even natural disasters could stop Luca Raffaelli, director of the Festival, from offering a program containing a wide range of animation from a variety of productions. The setting for Cartoombria is the magnificent old Pavone Theater, where the spectator can watch the screenings, meetings, presentations and debates on a wide range of themes, types, styles and applications from morning until late at night. Each section of the Festival is hosted on one particular day rather then being divided into daily blocks as in most festivals. This scheme creates interesting contrasts and couplings, and obliges a stimulating reflection on the language of animation in all its multicolored facets.

Osvaldo Cavandoli next to the Cartoombria '97 festival poster which he designed. Photo courtesy of Chiara Magri.

Fostering Understanding
The Cartoombria `97 poster, designed by Osvaldo Cavandoli, presents a horrible Japanese-style cartoon robot showing a metallic fist, beneath him is the artist's famous character from La linea (The Line), responding in an inequivocable rude gesture. The poster sums up in a comical, rather than an aggressive way, the underlying theme of the Festival: the often difficult meeting ground between Japanese and independent, artistic film in Italy.

This apparently contradictory position provides a very piquant and useful premise for the analysis of the role of animation in communication and entertainment, and its possible development. In both cases, in fact, one can see how animation is tending to break out of the confines of children's productions to meet the needs of the adult world or to express an independent art form. In Italy, as in the majority of western cultures, Japanese animation does not receive critical acclaim. Commercial broadcasters have tended to fill their schedules with these cartoons; buying them in bulk without any specific criteria and cutting them up to fit in with other children's programs which are already made to very low standards. On the other hand, Italian animators have, until very recently, been excluded from the television market and have nearly always shown aversion, or at least indifference, to the relatively poor Japanese product which is seen as an unwanted competitor.

Cartoombria has bravely attempted to close the distance between these two worlds. It was a great pleasure to see the enthusiasm of the young Japanese animation fans, while the connoisseurs and filmmakers suddenly discovered the extraordinary variety of Japanese productions.