Guest country: Italy

Animated cinema in its short format, which is considered by some to be the highest expression of this form of cinema, has experienced quite easily separable periods in Italy since the post-war period. The first is usually made to coincide with the TV advertising show, an original Italian format, called Carosello, aired daily on national TV channels from 1957 to 1977. The format consisted of a series of five films, most of them made with animation techniques, lasting about three minutes each. Carosello was not and could not be just a container of advertising messages: the number of seconds devoted to advertising, the number of mentions of the product name, the number of seconds to be devoted to the ‘show’, whose plot had to be unrelated to the product, were predetermined. This format led to the birth of countless animation studios that were able to work with great profit, with a flourishing economy that allowed them to deal with artistic animation productions unrelated to the commercial aspect, even to the production of feature films (the example of the Bozzetto studio is emblematic, which managed to produce: three feature films in that twenty-year period, the entire series dedicated to the ‘Adventures of Mr. Rossi’, and a considerable number of short films starting with ‘Tapum! La storia delle armi’ in 1958). During this same period, Giulio Gianini and Emanuele Luzzati were very active, who made all their films inspired by music by Rossini and Mozart between 1964 and 1978. Also linked to Carosello was Manfredo Manfredi, author of the very theme song of the format, as well as between the 1960s and 1970s of a considerable number of short films with very socially and artistically committed themes.
With the closure of Carosello in 1977, a deep crisis, first and foremost an economic one, began for the entire Italian animation sector and dozens of studios with a considerable number of animators employed by them were forced to close. 
An attempt was made to emerge from this crisis in the mid-1990s thanks also to the graduates of the school of the Istituto Superiore per le Industrie Artistiche in Urbino, among whom we find Gianluigi Toccafondo and Roberto Catani. Another talented Italian animator, the Tuscan painter Ursula Ferrara, was also active in those years. But we cannot speak of a real movement, even though it is perhaps in this phase that what historian Giannalberto Bendazzi defines as the Neo-pictorial movement of Italian animation takes shape.
The early 2000s are also characterised by a scarce presence of significant Italian authors, with the exception of Simone Massi, who also came from the Urbino school.
At the end of the first decade of the third millennium, a turning point took place that can be linked to the release of two films, the first Italian shorts with a viral response on the WEB of planetary scope: ‘Muto’ by Blu (2008) and ‘Videogioco’ (2010) by Donato Sansone, if the former is an artist outside the box representing an autarkic tendency that he shares with many animators, mavericks, active in those years; Donato Sansone, comes from the Scuola Sperimentale del Cinema sezione animazione (Experimental School of Animation Cinema), in Turin, and can be considered the leader of a series of talents that were formed in that school and that today, together with the Urbino school, is an indisputable forge of signatures that are giving new importance to Italian animation cinema.

Andrea Martignoni - animation historian, artistic director of ANIMAPHIX Festival