I’m in the process of finalising the research for my upcoming presentation.
I was struggling to find an Italian animator I admired or at least felt close to. There is a movie I’m really fond of but couldn’t find much about the actual production, so I decided to focus on a historical period instead.
I grew up hearing my parents and grandparents speaking fondly about a certain tv advert space called Il Carosello. It was broadcast between 1959 and 1977 and over the course of those 18 years it launched the career of many Italian animators. It also represented a great opportunity for independent animation, as the demand to advertise new products on tv rose in conjunction with the post war economical boom. Carosello became one of the most popular and loved programme in Italian tv due to the unconventional way advertisement was presented. Instead of having an invasive approach the spots were usually dominated by a 2-3 minutes narrative which would later end with the advert of a specific product.
Some of the characters became so famous that shows were created after Carosello was terminated. My favourite has always been Calimero, the black chick. Originally created to advertise a brand of soap detergent (as you would always find out he’s not black, but just dirty), he later became the star of his own show, though the animation production was moved to Japan.
I appreciate the simplicity of his design and even though I still haven’t found what artists influenced the Pagot brother when creating the character, I still think there’s a great resemblance to some of the mainstream animation cartoon that were broadcast in America at the time, such as Hanna-Barbera.