Quirino Cristiani
Quirino Cristiani (
July 2,
1896 -
August 2,
1984) was an
Argentine animation director and
cartoonist, responsible for the world's first two animated feature films as well as the first animated feature film with sound.
Cristiani was born on
July 2,
1896, in Santa Guiletta,
Italy. His family moved to
Buenos Aires, Argentina, in
1900, and Quirino spent his childhood soaking up the fast pace and left-leaning politics of the great southern metropolis. He came to consider himself a
porteño first (as the natives of the port of Buenos Aires called themselves) and an Argentinian second.
As a teenager, he developed a passion for drawing, which led him through a brief course with the Academy of Fine Arts to the publication of political
caricatures for the city newspapers. Soon the perfect target for his satire presented himself.
The national elections of
1916 peacefully ended the thirty-six-year-long rule of the Conservative party and placed Radical party leader
Hipólito Yrigoyen (also spelled "Irigoyen") in the
President's seat. Yrigoyen favored the lower middle class, especially in Buenos Aires, and granted unprecedented freedom to the press. The press in response turned on him, mocking his social awkwardness, his replacement of Conservative corruption with Radical corruption in the government, and his decision to keep Argentina out of
World War I, a decision that was unpopular with the
Germanophilic Argentine military. He was soon dubbed "Peludo" ("shaggy") for his lack of personal grooming (with the additional slang meaning of "idiot").
Living in the capital was another Italian immigrant,
Frederico Valle, once a cameraman and director in Europe (he used
Wilbur Wright's visit to
Rome in
1909 as the opportunity to film the world's first aerial
cinematography), now a producer of
newsreels for his adopted country. Valle was apolitical, but he knew the porteños were not. He hired the twenty-year old Cristiani off the street, gave him "Les allumettes animées" ("Animated Matches", 1908) by
Emile Cohl to teach him technique, and set him loose. Before 1916 was out, Valle's newsreel
Actualides Valle came out with an episode including the one minute cartoon "La intervención en la provencia de Buenos Aires" ("Intervention in the Province of Buenos Aires") by Quirino Cristiani. The cartoon was about Yrigoyen's ouster of Buenos Aires governor Marcelino Ugarte for dishonesty. This film used cardboard cutouts as the form of animation, a choice Cristiani would stick with throughout his career.
This short film did surprisingly well, and Valle announced a new project: the green animator would next create the world's first feature-length animated film, with President Yrigoyen as the subject. The funding would come from a Mr. Franchini, who owned a chain of movie theaters to show the finished film. Cristiani would get his character designs from newspaper cartoonist Diógenes Taborda (pen name "El Mono", "The Monkey"). Amazingly, Cristiani actually managed to accomplish his goal (doing the lion's share of the animation while Taborda found better uses for his valuable time): the 58,000-frame
El Apóstol (an hour and ten minutes at an anemic 14 frames per second) premiered on
November 9,
1917.
The movie was a satire, with President Yrigoyen ascending to the heavens to use
Jupiter's thunderbolts to cleanse Buenos Aires of immorality and corruption. The result is a burnt city. The film was well-received. Most of the praise went to producer Valle, with what was left over going to Taborda.
In
1918, the
German commander in Argentina, Baron von Luxburg, decided to manipulate Argentina into joining World War I on its side by sinking an Argentine ship and blaming the act on the
Entente. The tales of the survivors of the incident led nearly everyone to realize what really happened, but Yrigoyen swung his political weight to cover the incident up, out of fear that Argentina might be pushed into the war as an enemy of Germany, an outcome he feared just as much as a German alliance.
Cristiani saw the incident as the perfect opportunity, and with a new set of producers created the world's second feature-length animated film,
Sin dejar rastros in 1918. The title ("Leaving No Trace") was a reference to von Luxburg's supposed order to the German U-boat captain who sank the ship. President Yrigoyen felt he had no choice but to order the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to confiscate the film the day after it premiered. In doing this, the Radical showed himself little better than the repressive Conservative presidents he had replaced. On the other hand, Cristiani was not imprisoned and spent the next several years creating political cartoons and caricatures for the newspapers. Two other animated features were put out at this time by Andrés Ducaud, the man who designed the fire effects in
El Apóstol.
To support his growing family, Cristiani founded the advertising company Publi-Cinema, where he made short commercial cartoons. To show these cartoons, he traveled to the poorer parts of town, where no movie theaters were to be found, and showed the paying public
Chaplin shorts and other films interspersed with his animation. This did so well that the police shut him down for "disturbing the peace and interrupting traffic".
President "Peludo" finished out his six-year term in
1922, and was succeeded by another Radical,
Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear. During Alvear's presidency, Cristiani started making animated shorts for entertainment purposes. Some of the titles included "Firpo-Dempsey" (
1923) on the
boxing match between
American heavyweight champion
Jack Dempsey and Argentinian champion
Luis Firpo, "Uruguayos forever" (
1924) on
Uruguay's Olympic gold medal in soccer, and "Humberto de garufa" ("Little Umberto's Folic", 1924), on the visit of Italian Prince
Umberto of Savoy to Buenos Aires. In
1926, a fire destroyed Federico Valle's film vaults. Among the films lost forever was
El Apóstol.
In
1928, the aging Hipólito Yrigoyen was re-elected president of Argentina. Cristiani felt that the man was too dominated by the corrupt leaders of the Radical party. With a script by Eduardo Gonzalez Lanuza, he set out to make his third animated feature film,
Peludópolis. The movie was be a sort of fable, with pirate Yrigoyen's floating "Peludo City" (Argentina) beset by hungry sharks (the Radicals). Cristiani converted the operation over to sound partway through, including a few songs in the soundtrack (he used the primitive
sound-on-disc system for the recording since it was unlikely that most Argentine theaters would be able to handle
sound-on-film at the time of release). Then, on
September 6,
1930, a year into production, work on
Peludópolis was halted when President Yrigoyen was ousted by a Conservative military
coup d'état. With so much invested in the film so far, Cristiani decided to proceed, re-arranging the plot to de-emphasize Yrigoyen and the sharks, and carefully adding the characters of the generals as the heroes, in an attempt to protect himself from possible persecution. He then added an everyman character named Juan Pueblo, to become the moral center of the film. With the provisional blessing of the provisional ruler of Argentina, General
José Félix Uriburu, Cristiani premiered the film on
September 16,
1931. It was the first animated film with sound.
Few people felt that the wake of a revolution was the right time to laugh about it. In addition, the
Great Depression had come to Argentina. Worst of all, Yrigoyen died in bed in
1933 and suddenly the entire country was gripped with grief for a man few had cared deeply for when he was alive. Cristiani respectfully withdrew the film from circulation.
Quirino Cristiani never had another chance for greatness in animation.
Mickey Mouse took over Argentina like he had the rest of the world, and like so many other artists, Cristiani couldn't compete. Studios Cristiani was converted into a dubbing/subbing lab, one of the best of its kind in Argentina.
Cristiani made three more animated films in his life, none of which was very memorable. When
Walt Disney came to Argentina as part of his
Latin America research tour, Cristiani showed his films to him, then sent him to cartoonist Molina Campos, the source of the
gaucho segment in
Saludos Amigos (
1943). Two fires in
1957 and
1961 destroyed the majority of Cristiani's work, including the only prints of
Peludópolis. He died in Bernal, Argentina, on
August 2,
1984.
* Giannalberto Bendazzi (Anna Taraboletti-Segre, translator);
Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation; Indiana University Press; ISBN 0-253-20937-4 (paperback reprint, 2001)
* Quirino Cristiani, The Untold Story of Argentina's Pioneer Animator, by Giannalberto Bendazzi: http://www.awn.com/mag/issue1.4/articles/bendazzi1.4.html
