ANIMAFEST PRO | ANIMAFEST SCANNER XII | PANEL 1: EXPLORING ANIMATION IN EPHEMERAL FILMS

From Animating Puppets to the Essence of the Line - Two Milestones in Osvaldo Cavandoli’s Career in Animation Advertising - ANDRIJANA RUŽIĆ

PANEL 1 - EXPLORING ANIMATION IN EPHEMERAL FILMS
03/06 TUE 12:10-12:40 KIC

The irascible, yet endearing, big-nosed little man known as La Linea is globally familiar. He is not only part of Italian heritage, but he also belongs to all of us, due to his universality. His vicissitudes strike a chord with everyone, making us laugh heartily, which is the most difficult thing there is: making people laugh. Laughing at him, we laugh at ourselves, at our weaknesses that we recognise as his, at our failures that are also his. La Linea is the protagonist of a series of animated shorts, created in the late 1960s for Italian public television (RAI) and animated by Osvaldo Cavandoli, the Italian director who passed away in 2007. La Linea is reborn each time from a white line, and on it, he lives his adventures in two minutes and thirty seconds. But to arrive at the essential trait of a simple white drawn line of La Linea, the Milanese director accumulated many years of experience in the Italian animation industry, from classic Disney-style animation to stop-motion animation.
In addition to a brief outline of Osvaldo Cavandoli's career trajectory, this paper intends to focus more specifically on his activity in the field of producing advertising shorts for cinema circuits in his Milanese studio called Pupilandia. Cavandoli directed thirteen puppet commercial films, almost a one-man show, in the period from 1950 to 1957: these were the result of pure craftsmanship. However, at the beginning of 1957, the entire Italian territory was covered by the television signal, and advertising consequently shifted to a specific container, an Italian advertising television programme called Carosello (1957 – 1977). This event also marked the closure of the Pupilandia studio in that same year. Laborious and expensive to make, Osvaldo’s short commercials would have difficulty finding new markets, as the demand from cinemas was diminishing. In my presentation, a couple of advertising films produced in the Pupilandia studio, rarely seen elsewhere, will be screened.

Andrijana Ružić graduated in History and Criticism of Art at the Università degli Studi in Milan, Italy, specializing in History of Animated Film under Giannalberto Bendazzi's mentorship. As an independent scholar, she has participated in numerous international conferences for animation studies, presenting works of diverse independent authors of animation, and has served as a juror and a film selector on international animation festivals. In the period from 2012 to 2019, she has been a film programmer of the animated film section at the International Comics Festival in Belgrade, Serbia. She is a member of the Selection board of Animafest Scanner, the international symposium for contemporary animation studies held annually at the International Festival of Animated Film (Animafest) in Zagreb, Croatia. She writes about animation and other arts for Belgrade weekly magazine Vreme, Croatian film magazine Hrvatski filmski ljetopis, and French animation magazine Blinkblank, and is the author of the book Michael Dudok de Wit - A Life in Animation (CRC Focus).