Film Review: Bob Spit – We Do Not Like People by Cesar Cabral

Bob Spit – We Do Not Like People, Cesar Cabral. Coala Filmes, 2021.

Reviewed by Pedro Moura

Bob Spit is an hour-and-half stop-motion animation/feature documentary film directed by Cesar Cabral about Brazilian cartoonist extraordinaire Angeli. The film was awarded Best Feature at the Contrechamp section in the international animation festival of Annecy in 2021, a section which is “dedicated to,” in the words of Variety's Jamie Lang, “emerging talent from around the world and films that lie outside the mainstream.”

As the title reveals, the focus of attention is Bob Spit (originally “Bob Cuspe”), one of Angeli's most known characters from the 1980s. But it also threads the needle through the artist's oeuvre, his creative block, his aging, and a fair degree of nostalgia. This is a non-fiction project mixed with fiction, in which we'll slide through various degrees of remove from a purportedly “real” - stop-motion animation, documentary angles, the diegetic world of the character, historical contextualizations, fantasy, and so on.

Without wanting to rehash the discussion about the feasibility and pertinence of talking about “animated documentaries,” something that has been discussed by people far more informed than me, I believe that Bob Spit will nevertheless become a very good example of such an expanding field. Foremost, for being an exploration of interpretative frameworks larger and more profound that a supposedly “objective” or “journalistic” approach. We literally delve into Angeli's psyche, but in an oblique manner, so instead of having clear-cut decisive conclusions, we are rather invited to keep on thinking about the issues for ourselves.

The film follows two major storylines. On the one hand, we have an interview set in Angeli's apartment, where he clearly answers an interlocutor sitting off camera, discussing his work, career and life, showing archival material, and sometimes accessing third parties that talk about him. Angeli finds himself in a bind, and refuses to be stuck to older glories. So he resorts to recycling a strategy and decides to kill off Bob Spit, as he did before with other characters.

On the other hand, we follow what seems to be a fictive roadtrip adventure. The titular character, Bob Spit, embarks on a journey, crossing a desert-like, post-apocalyptic landscape, in his quest to meet his creator, Angeli. After learning of the cartoonist's plan to kill him – through the “prophecies” of tattered pages of the comics he stars in – Bob vows to take vengeance on his own creator.

We must always bear in mind that when we’re speaking of this whole interview setting, we are referring to a construction. After all, everything is depicted through three-dimensional puppets and backgrounds. The artificiality of the interview is made “natural” by making visible the presence of the filming crew, not only through dialogue but also through metatextual techniques such as video framing, timestamps, and other materiality traces. But if animated documentaries allow us to go well beyond indexicality, some of the less conventional techniques followed by Cabral bring about other issues, that keep us off balance and therefore alert at all times.

For instance, there are momentary “glitches” that allow us to see the actual photographic footage of the interviews Cabral and his crew did with Angeli, which can be seen as the supposed scaffolding of the final animated plane. So the film never leaves us in a continuously comfortable state of watching what unfolds. We are permanently jarred back and forth in these dimensions. According to Annabelle Honess Roe, “the use of animation as a representational strategy broadens the potential of documentary by expanding the range of what can be shown and told” (Animated Documentary). And what is shown and told in Bob Spit goes well beyond the Brazilian cartoonist's take on his own work.

Somewhat like the Quay Brother's Street of Crocodiles, it's as if we have access here to multiple levels of reality and existence – Angeli's “normal life” and Bob Spit's imaginary adventure storyworld –, but we do not have a precise map of how one level relates ontologically to the other. It would be easy to say that the latter is an extension of Angeli's “imagination” or “stories,” but it gets more complicated than that, in a crooked Lynchian logic sort of way. Nevertheless, there is a certain coherence and fluidity to this patchwork, as the director dovetails the artist's life, thoughts and art into a continuous unfolding thread. Mostly, this stems from the overall framing of Angeli's voice taking precedence over the whole narrative. At one point, someone asks Angeli if they can ask him a question. Angeli simply answers, “No.” Not because there are no questions to be asked or no answers to be given, but because we are always already within the discourse that makes up the whole text.

Notwithstanding, the projects allows for a number of shifting points of view. Apart from Angeli's speech, we go into the fictive underworld of Bob Spit, even if his adventure is mostly framed by the Kowalski twins. But, as mentioned above, we also have access to Angeli's wife Carol, fellow cartoonist Laerte (yet another giant from the 1980s, still extremely active today and admired by Angeli) and the ex-editor/taxi driver, which has a few words of choice about the author. Later on, other characters appear, bringing other types of “glitches” into the mix.  

Arnaldo Angeli Filho was born in São Paulo in 1956, and belongs to a generation of self-taught artists who were heavily influenced by the preceding golden age of Brazilian illustrators, comics artists and cartoonists, upholding thus a genuine national tradition, even if mixing it with the most diverse sources of foreign material. In Angeli's case, the influence of Robert Crumb is unmistakable, specifically his ability to come up incessantly fully formed characters, many of which would become recurrent. From the hippie duo Wood & Stock to the sexual deviant Rê Bordosa and, of course, the anti-social yet shrewd commentator Bob Cuspe. 

Most, if not all of these characters were born in the daily strips he created in the early 1980s in the pages of the Folha de S. Paulo, in which he had been working as a very politicized and combative editorial cartoonist since 1973. Around that same era, his interest for comics proper lead him to several editorial projects, thanks to a collection put out by the publishing house Circo, called Chiclete com Banana (“Gum with Banana;” really, I'm not kidding, it's not “of”). Its success was so great that the publishers decided to give Angeli a regular magazine. This also heralded an outstanding number of influential titles presenting a powerhouse new generation of cartoonists, including Laerte and Glauco, with whom Angeli would form an informal trio for years to come.

Chiclete com Banana would feature then a plethora of characters, including the “pervert” variant of the two-kid team trope Skrotinhos to con man/spiritual leader Rhalah Rikhota, both of whom appear in this very same film. But many, many others would be penned by Angeli, all of them hilarious stock characters very much related to the cultural specificities of the city of São Paulo (arguably the cultural capital of Brazil, or at least so “Paulistanos” like to believe).

This is not the first time Angeli is involved with filmmaking. In 2006 Otto Guerra adapted another character-driven strip into Wood & Stock: Sex, Oregano and Rock'n Roll. Cesar Cabral directed first a short based on Rê Bordosa in 2008, and in 2017 launched a television series called Angeli the Killer, in which he adapted many of the cartoonist's stories, brought his characters to life and conducted (and animated in stop-motion) interviews. To a certain extent, Bob Spit, the movie, is an extension of that project. But it is also a simplification, as it attempts to create a more or less linear and organized structuring of its themes, instead of the more loose, hectic and even frantic pace of the tv series. 

Bob Spit brings a visual dynamic that was not extant in the original material: color, three-dimensionality and a certain lightness to it all. We should bear in mind that Angeli's original work was made out of heavy, “scratchy”, “dirty” hatchwork, very typical of a certain underground aesthetics. Coloring, and subdued, murky one at that, would come later. But Cabral's own capability for character design and construction, their dynamic movements, the framing and camera work makes up for a technically solid piece of work. Cabral’s use of an incredible variety of sounds sources, including “classic” Brazilian punk rock anthems of the 80s, creates nonetheless a seamless surface that eases the many transitions between planes and subjects. To watch a stop-motion character drawing on paper is an amazing experience, even if for the briefest of moments.

To be precise, while the main two storylines are depicted through stop animation techniques, there are other interpolated techniques, used as brief transition bumpers (but which sometimes are also used to convey further contextual information). In some of these, the animations made out of the strip's art – basically quickly superimposing several of the strips' panels, but judiciously choosing similar positions of the character— is superb. And these scenes are particularly good precisely because they do not aim to disguise their origins or bring up the idea that “animated cartoons” are better than the original drawn cartoons, but because they leave visually present the variegated materiality of the original newsprint, including within their transition effects.

While Angeli's more recent work is slightly more introspective, sometimes with the cartoonist drawing himself, and engaging, quite often with zen-like adages, his 1980s and 1990s work, from which this movie stems, was quite virulent, frank and adversarial. In a word, punk. But what is at stake in Bob Spit is not simply an adaptation of those stories. Angeli appears in his present age, preferring to stay home, listening to records, working alone and uninterrupted. And Bob Spit himself is not his old self, living in the busy streets of São Paulo. He looks slightly tired, living off the flesh of maimed mutant Elton Johns, unable to spit (his trademark move, and hence his name). The possibility of killing his creator is the only little spark of joy that seems achievable, and even that does not change his demeanor. To put it simply, neither creator nor created character are the personalities that they once were, and that most people remember. There may be a hint of nostalgia in making this documentary, but both Angeli and Bob Spit himself suffer no fools gladly and are willing to disabuse people of their expectations.

 

Another potentiality of the animated documentary underlined by Roe is its capacity to what she calls “pointing inwards,” i.e., the possibility of employing non-mimetic strategies that go beyond issues of verisimilitude and evocative planes that open up to more complex, less directly accessible emotional or inner mental states of the portraitee. In this case, many of the silences, hesitations and half-explored emotions by Angeli gain a body of their own in the imagetic translations.  While the film is not dealing with repressed memories or clear-cut traumas, as is the case of the world-famous case of Ari Folman's 2008 Waltz With Bashir, Bob Spit sometimes hints at the idea that the “road trip level” of Angeli's characters may correspond to a “sub-level” of Angeli's psyche. Angeli speaks (in the film, but also famously elsewhere) of his problems with alcohol, drugs and sexual behavior. After all, the Kowalskis, the Elton Johns and Bob Spit inhabit sewers, underground bunkers and tunnels beneath derelict urban landscapes (even though it’s filled with Easter Eggs, such as the curvy hill of Mara Tara’s thighs). They cross dilapidated and abandoned streets and roads, and when finally Bob emerges into Angeli's world, he seems to comes from below a sofa in which Angeli was sleeping. Were we watching that which Angeli was dreaming? They seem to touch each other briefly, but Angeli awakes. But soon enough, while on the elevator, a scene plays out a wonderfully staged crossing of worlds, as Angeli and Bob Spit finally meet each other. Characters rebelling against their creators is not necessarily new (Fleischer's Out of the Inkwell dates back to 1918), and neither is the clash of the different ontological worlds of creator and created (e.g. Grant Morrison's Animal Man, or even the 2006 Marc Forster's Stranger than Fiction), but there is something strangely satisfactory in watching an old familiar character conquering a different degree of autonomy in relation to both his author and audience, confirming his contrarian, punkish ethos.

 

 

For the people who are knowledgeable about Angeli's work and these characters, the film offers an opportunity to re-engage with, and re-interpret it all with hindsight. Is Bob's punkish verve, the smash-it-all, kicking-against-the-pricks, spit-on attitude still an answer to society's problems? To apathy? To the sure destruction of the world? To the idiocy that surrounds us? Now that we are older, that our backs hurt, and that we don't want to get around much anymore, we may think we don't have the same energy, sure. But deep inside, just as Angeli in the end leans over his window, above the anonymous streets below, and spits, we think to ourselves, as Bob Spit would have said, “Fuck, yeah!

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23:2.

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Since this material will be unfamiliar to many of our readers, the following is from the movie's press release and a preview is on YouTube :

BOB SPIT - WE DO NOT LIKE PEOPLE is a stop-motion animation that mixes documentary, comedy and road-movie. It tells the story of Bob Spit, an old punk trying to escape from a post-apocalyptic desert that is actually, a purgatory inside the mind of his creator, Angeli, a cartoonist going through a creative crisis.The story is freely inspired by the life and work of one of the most celebrated Brazilian cartoonists of all times, Angeli, who became famous in the 70s by releasing political cartoons in the midst of Brazil’s military dictatorship. In the 80s, he migrated to daily strips, showing an acid sense of humor to represent Brazil’s society, day-to-day life and customs. Angeli had editorial success with his monthly magazine “Chiclete com Banana,” which sold over 120 thousand copies per edition. During his time, the cartoonist has created some of his most famous characters: the bohemian diva Rê Bordosa, the hippie pair Wood & Stock, and the punk Bob Spit.

DIRECTOR’S BIOGRAPHY

Cesar Cabral has a degree in Cinema through the Arts and Communication School - São Paulo University (ECA-USP). He began his career as a stop-motion animator in 1998 and co-founded the animation company Coala Filmes in 2000. He directed the stop-motion short films The Re Bordosa Dossier (2008), which won more than 70 awards in Brazilian and international film festivals, and Storm (2010) selected to many prestigious film festivals all around the world, such as Annecy, Hiroshima, Havana and Sundance. Cesar created and directed 2 seasons of the young adult stopmotion animated series Angeli The Killer, selected to 2018 Annecy Film Festival and broadcasted at Canal Brasil. Bob Spit - We Do Not Like People was awarded best feature at Contrechamp section in Annecy 2021.
 
With the voices of Milhem Cortaz, Paulo Miklos, Grace Gianoukas, André Abujamra, Laerte, Hugo Passolo, Angeli.

MILHEM CORTAZ does Bob Spit’s original voice. One of Brazil’s most exciting actors, he has played parts in films such as “Elite Squad”, “Elite Squad 2”, “Carandiru” and the DGA nominated "A Wolf at the Door." He has also voiced the character in the series “Angeli The Killer”
 
PAULO MIKLOS does the characters’ original voice for THE KOWALSKI BROTHERS, who live in the desert gathering pages of the “Chiclete com Banana” Magazine. When they meet Bob Spit, they encourage him to find Angeli.  A gifted actor and musician, he played in seminal Brazilian rock band “Titãs” and had striking parts in films and TV Series such as “O Invasor”, “Estômago” and “É Proibido Fumar”, “Sessão de Terapia” e “Os Normais.”

ANDRÉ ABUJAMRA does the characters’ original voice  of RHALAH RHIKOTA, a charlatan guru who had his fame and followers in the 80s. He is the mentor of the Kowalski brothers.  A musician, comedian and actor, Abujamra has a long story in Brazil’s pop rock scene. He was the composer of “Carandiru”, and has parts in films and tv shows such as “Estômago” and “A Grande Família”.
 
GRACE GIANOUKAS is Rê Bordosa’s original voice. RÊ is a junkie diva who was the most famous of Angeli’s characters. The cartoonist killed her in the 80s, and since then she is a lingering presence in his life. An actress, director, screenwriter and producer, she had several roles in theatre, TV and cinema. She is currently starring in the TV Globo soap opera “Orgulho e Paixão”.

Book Review: The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and their Publics, ed. by Woo and Stoll

The Comics World: Comic Books, Graphic Novels, and their Publics. Edited by Benjamin Woo and Jeremy Stoll. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. HC $99. PB, $30. < https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Comics-World>

 

Reviewed by Matthew J. Costello

Professor of Political Science

Saint Xavier University

Chicago, IL USA

 

 

Woo and Stoll have curated a collection of essays to point comics studies beyond its language and literature roots, and situate it within a social-scientific tradition. To bridge the gap between social sciences and humanities, they define a general social scientific orientation derived from mid-twentieth century sociology emphasizing the meanings people attribute to social action and tempered by Bourdieu’s approach to cultural production. The anchoring frame is Howard Becker’s notion of “art worlds,” comprised of “everyone necessary for a work of art to be produced in the way that it was in fact produced.” (xiv) and this would include the creators, corporations, retailers of various kinds, critics, scholars and consumers. The fourteen essays are grouped into three general categories of the comics world: production, circulation, and reception. Woo and Stoll note that an art form as diverse as comics may have “many worlds” (xiv). The essays reflect this by examining diverse communities of producers and consumers from the US, Latin America, and Asia; and multiple channels of circulation using a variety of methodologies, including ethnography, survey research, economic geography, and institutional analysis. The volume thus captures much of the diversity across various comics worlds.

The essays are strongest overall and cohere best in the section on production. Together, the five essays in this section seek to identify who produces comics, where they produce comics, and the global and political influences on comics production. Woo’s essay reporting results of a survey of comics producers notes that most producers engage in multiple fields of production—with a publisher or self-publishing, work-for-hire or creator-owned—and that few make comics their full-time job. Essays by Maynard and Lent explore communities that produce comics geographically and by gender and the importance of these communities for creating a space for comics production. Exner and Gomes offer essays on the transnational and editorial roles in the origins of manga and the use of comics as tools for political education during the Unidad Popular in Chile, respectively.

The second section, circulation, is more of a mixed bag. The consequences of comics’ move from ghettoized niche form to major commercial center of popular culture are explored in Bart Beaty’s consideration of the rise and fall of the comics press and Salkowitz’s classification and discussion of different fan communities at Comic-Con. The use of comics for school and social education are explored in essays by Sabeti and Wieskamp. Wieskamp’s study of Priya’s Shakti reveals how transnational ties and non-western ideas can be used in a comic to try to bring about cultural change, in this case to raise consciousness of how to address violence against females.

The essays on reception are probably the weakest in the collection. Sinervo’s essay on comics scanning makes a convincing argument that scanners considered themselves fan participants in the comics world rather than pirates or free-speech defenders, and Galdieri shows that readers’ participation in leadership elections for the Legion of Superheroes demonstrated fan commitment to the series’ history. Neither essay really fulfills its promise of revealing underlying ideologies of their subjects. The other two essays in this section identify that Comic-Con attendees seek a sense of community and that comics fans see fandom as informing other parts of their lives.

Together the essays provide a description of the comics world (or worlds as Woo and Stoll prefer), but they do not provide much analysis of how this world is shaped and why, although many point in directions that would be interesting to explore. How, for instance, does the political economy of the culture industries generate specific kinds of comics production? Woo’s essay suggests that comics producers continue to be an economically marginalized community, more diverse at the economic margins. Maynard and Lent show how marginalized communities can work together to build support, with Maynard, in particular, exploring how government gate-keeping in the area of cultural production can force such marginalized communities together. Considering how these different communities are affected by and navigate the structures of the political economy of cultural production and how that affects their products seems one clear direction for research. Another is how the reception by fan communities is affected by the hegemony of neoliberal production in the culture industries. Beaty shows that the comics press has been undermined in both form and function by the explosive growth of comics in mainstream culture. Salkowitz examines how Comic-Con has been transformed by the influx of non-fan cultural tourists, and Sinervo shows how the move to digital publication by major producers effectively subsumed and destroyed the scanner sub-culture. While these discrete pieces offer descriptive histories or sociological snapshots, they cry out for a systematic analysis of the effects of the changing political economy of the comics industry on fan communities. Finally, the essays by Exner, Gomes and Wieskamp offer insights into specific political and transnational influences in the comics world. How does increased globalization affect the production, circulation, and reception of comics?  Exner suggests that manga was influenced more by US cartooning than previously thought but also notes the reverse effects in recent years. Gomes describes how the Unidad Popular government sought to use comics to reverse the imperialist ideas imported into 1960’s Chile. Wieskamp demonstrates that diasporic communities can cross national boundaries to create comics that bring non-western ideas to address major social issues. These essays suggest another fruitful direction for research would be to interrogate the ways various cross-national ties link, inform, and empower the marginalized communities discussed by Maynard, Lent, and Woo to produce different kinds of comics in different worlds in the face of the hegemonic and homogenizing neoliberal influences.

Woo and Stoll’s The Comics World is a well-conceived and thoughtfully executed catalog of many of the ways that social scientists would describe the 21^st century comics worlds. It is an important starting point for the development of a social scientific study of comics. As such should be of interest not only to comics scholars, but to anyone interested in the sociology of culture in general. More importantly, it points toward new directions for further research and sustained causal analysis of how the changing political economy of the comics worlds affects production and reception and how it creates opportunities for marginalized communities to appropriate elements of the comics worlds to engage these power structures. I expect this text will be widely read and cited and remembered as a foundational text in the broadening of comics studies.

 

A version of this review will appear in IJOCA 23:2. 

Remembrance of Giannalberto Bendazzi (1946-2021)

 Remembrance of Giannalberto Bendazzi (1946-2021)

 by 

John A. Lent

 

I first met Giannalberto Bendazzi when I picked him up at the Philadelphia International Airport, April 8, 2002, but I knew of his contributions to animation studies for years. He was staying at my home for a few days. On the drive to my house, Giannalberto began talking about his wife. I chimed in about mine, just having been divorced--a second time, no less. Then, out of nowhere, Bendazzi tells me he takes his wife to the beach every week. Things can’t be that bad if he does that. Not so, he snapped back; he took her there hoping the sharks would get her. A sample of the dark humor he was capable of.

For the next few days, we talked about everything--of course, animation, a book he invited me to co-edit, our Italianness, and, of course, his wife. We spent a day in New York City with Oscar-winning animator and professor John Canemaker and others, had a potluck dinner at my house with Temple University colleagues and graduate students interested in animation, and visited the nearby Brandywine Museum and its Wyeth family collections. Bendazzi also lectured on animator Alexandre Alexeieff to a large class of film students at Temple University after which he described as a listless bunch.

About a month later, we met again at Penn Station in Manhattan. Bendazzi wanted to fill me in on a huge book project he was planning with mutual friend, Keith Bradbury of Australia. They had invited me to join them in co-editing a 16-volume, tentatively titled, Understanding Animation:  An Anthology of Documents and Sources. Indiana University Press showed a keen interest in publishing the books to be extended over ten years. As far as I know, the project did not come to fruition; Giannalberto wrote us in April 2003, saying he wanted to put it on the “back burner.” Keith suggested that he and I continue, but this did not materialize either. I think Bendazzi wanted time to continue where his 1994 groundbreaking Cartoons left off, organizing what was to be the three-volume Animation:  A World History. He asked me to write the sections on Taiwan and India, and coordinate with the collaboration of Hassan Muthalib, the Southeast Asia part, including Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

Animation:  A World History hit snags along an eight-year journey, about which Bendazzi lamented to me. John Libbey Publishing was commissioned to bring out the volumes, but needed a co-publisher for an American edition. Multiple publishers, including Indiana University Press and University of California Press, rejected the proposition, complaining the book was too large. Focal Press, affiliated with Taylor & Francis, eventually published the nearly 1,100 pages in three volumes in 2016.

I saw Giannalberto twice more, when we had dinner at the Milan airport Oct. 24, 2002, during a layover I had enroute to Lviv and at a comics and animation conference in Jilin, China, in September 2006. We kept up a correspondence at our lazy paces; his emails were personal at times, philosophical some times, sad and happy, humble and proud, but usually, peppered with some sarcasm and much wit. When I sent him a review I wrote of his work, he replied:  “I received the review, made three somersaults and sent it to my publisher. We have a very well-coordinated opinion of each other:  I tell him he is an idiot, and he behaves so” (May 22, 2017). On one occasion, he labeled his publishers “slow as a snail,” another publisher as “the worst bunch of screw-ups on the planet,” and bemoaned the “geological times” of another publisher.

He could also tangle up emotions as in this Sept. 18, 2014 email:

 

you bet that I will come to see you!

After the publication of the book, I will be travelling around to present it, and get some rewarding appraisal. Actually, I don’t give anything for appraisal=vanity. Appraisal is a substitute for love. I wrote all my books in order to demonstrate that I am honest, intelligent, in other words, worth [sic] to be loved.

Mine was a lifelong search for this thing, but I didn’t succeed.

I’m 68 and I’m alone.

I have no complaints:  I did my best, with sincerity.

I’m deeply devoted to animation, for its qualities but also because it is underloved. So I do my best to promote it and enrich the number of its loving specialists.

I always felt at home with animators from every country of the world because in general, they are sensitive, kindhearted, altruistic.

In other words, loving and lovable people.

Thank you for listening. I realize that this confession is almost embarrassing…

Your faithful,

Giannalberto

 

Giannalberto was always humbly thankful. When, on June 22, 2019, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the Universidade Lusόfona of Lisbon, that he said was “the first that an animation scholar ever received,” he sent many of us a note saying,

 

I thank all of you for the affection and teaching you have given me, in many ways, over many years of career. This result would not have been possible without you. I hope (I believe) that this is one more step in the ascent towards a generalized conception of animation as an art.

Thank you, Giannalberto (June 26, 2019)

 

That was Giannalberto Bendazzi as a human being:  kind, frank, intelligent, and accommodating. He usually called me a friend which I was appreciative of and honored by.

As for Giannalberto Bendazzi as a scholar, his accomplishments provide the answer. That he was a pioneer in animation studies and one of the field’s most outstanding representatives and promoters is undisputable. He took the route to a career in animation as so many of us have--via training and employment in other disciplines; his was law, which he studied but never practiced. Instead, he became a film critic and in the 1970s, began easing his way into animation, especially its history, a virgin topic outside of coverage of Disney, Fleischer, and other U.S. studios.

Giannalberto wrote books, monographs, and articles on various animators, such as Quirino Cristiani, Italian-born Argentine who created the world’s first animated feature, Osvaldo Cavandoli, Bruno Bozzetto, Alexandre Alexeieff, and others, as well as his best-known compilations, Cartoons:  One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation and Animation:  A World History. He held teaching stints at Università degli Studi di Milano (2002-2009), Nanyang Technological University of Singapore (2013-2015), and Griffith University in Australia; lectured and presented papers in Italy, U.S., China, Singapore, and elsewhere, and co-founded ASIFA-Italy (1982) and Society for Animation Studies (1987).

His death, at age 75, on Dec. 13, 2021, left a huge void in the profession of animation studies and in the hearts of those of us who had the privilege of knowing him, that will be difficult to fill.