Search form

The Animation Pioneer

With the feature animation industry booming in India, Lisa Goldman reports on the opportunities and challenges presented by an immense and diverse audience.

Another event of the festival was the screening of Gabriele Zucchelli's documentary Quirino Cristiani: The Mystery of the First Animated Movies, the story of an Italian-Argentine animator who is said to have created the first animation feature in the history of film.

The story of Quirino Cristiani is an obscure and fascinating tale first told on AWN in 1996 by the animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi and later was the subject of the book L'Uomo Che Anticipo Disney (The Man Who Anticipated Disney) by the same author. Zucchelli has now told the story in film format, travelling to Argentina and digging through the archives to find new clues, even discovering some unknown footage. The story has a very sad preface: almost all of the footage by this animation pioneer has been destroyed by fires in various film vaults.

Quirino Cristiani was catapulted into the history of cinema by an unusual set of circumstances. He had made an animated short using cut-out characters, animating by articulating the limbs of the characters from fixed points tied with thread. Buenos Aires cinema entrepreneur Federico Valle was enthusiastic and, sensing a market in the Argentine love for political cartoons, commissioned a full-length work, El Apostol, from Cristiani. Based on the cartoons of a popular cartoonist, the film told the fable of the populist Argentine president ascending to heaven to borrow some thunderbolts from Jupiter to wipe out the corruption in (i.e., destroy) Buenos Aires.

The notion that the first animated film could be a piece of political satire is weird enough, but Cristiani's story gets even more fascinating. His second film, Sin Dejar Rastros (Without a Trace), which recounted German skulduggery in trying to draw Argentina into World War I, literally disappeared without a trace, both negative and print, when it was confiscated by censors.

In contrast to Bendazzi's book, Zucchelli's film is full of Cristiani's animations, images, family photographs and other visual elements that add up to a much clearer idea of this man and his animation techniques. The film also takes us on a leisurely stroll through the settings of Cristiani'e life, perhaps a bit too leisurely. At 90 minutes, the film could say the same things in a more compressed time frame.