With the presentation by Bruno Bozzetto, the father of the Italian animated cartoons, concluded the first edition of AnimatiComo, a series of three seminars about computer animation organized by the researchers of the Polytechnic of Como.
I can safely say all the attendees have been fascinated by the words of the “father”, although he actually preferred to be called grandfather.
What impressed me the most, apart from his extreme clarity of exposition, was the firm belief which lead all of his career that you can do great things even with few resources. It all starts from creativity, then you use the tools at your disposal to express it, tools that don’t have to be necessarily the most technologically advanced and expensive. Just take a look at what he produced by using Flash and a lot of irony about the worst attitudes of Italian people in Europa&Italia, a short animation he made in 1999.
The seminar concluded with the projection of the cartoon Vip Mio Fratello Superuomo, one of his three full length movies, made in 1968.
Here you can read a brief interview with Bozzetto published by the local daily newspaper La Provincia.
All this contrasts al lot with the final results obtained by the Spanish big budget, for European standards at least, animation team who produced the 3D animation El Guerrero Sin Nombre, presented for the first time after its completion by Nacho Martin last week during the second of the three seminars. The cartoon rendering technique granted a unique and impressive look to the movie, but the empathy generated by the characters was light years distant from that stirred up into the spectators by Bozzetto’s Vip Brothers in my opinion.
I had the chance to talk a bit with the kind Nacho and he told me a phrase I only share only at half: the important is getting to the end…
AnimatiComo has been a really pleasant experience, made even more interesting by the fact I’m reading the book Animazione 3D wrote by Nicolò Ceccarelli and Daniele Bigi, the two main minds behind the event. Can’t wait for the next edition then!