#giulio gianini

[maimoncat]

Emanuele Luzzati e Giulio Gianini, Il gioco delle favole

Episodio 2, La donna serpente

@ariel-seagull-wings @themousefromfantasyland @adarkrainbow

[elegieenbleu]

GIULIO GIANINI & EMANUELE LUZZATI /

Polichinelle 1973

[maimoncat]

Were the animators of that italian fairy tale retelling anthology the people who made the opening credits animation for L'Armata de Brancaleone?

Because the style is very similar!

Yes! Luzzati and Gianini met in the 50s and collaborated for a long time on animations together, both on segments for other productions, like movie intros and advertisements, but also on indipendent films, like the magic flute, often adapting operatic music.

Their animations also won various prizes

Luzzati, who drew the images that Gianini would animate, also had a long fruitful career as illustrator and scenographer for theatre productions. He specialized in the fantastical and the dreamlike, often using collages

He also did a lot of works celebrating the culture of italian jews, cofounding with Alessandro Fersen the Compagnia del Teatro Ebraico

the screenshots I posted come from a miniseries that Gianini and Luzzati made in 1981 for the TSI, the italian swiss television, adapting different fairy tales. Before this they had received funds from RAI, but the broadcasting company was focused more on importing foreign animations, like japanese anime, during the 80s.

@mask131 @themousefromfantasyland @princesssarisa

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Emanuele Luzzati e Giulio Gianini, Il gioco delle favole.

Episodio 1, L'uccello di Fuoco

@adarkrainbow @themousefromfantasyland @princesssarisa @ariel-seagull-wings @the-blue-fairie

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Emanuele Luzzati e Giulio Gianini, Il gioco delle favole

episodio 5: la ragazza cigno

@adarkrainbow @themousefromfantasyland @ariel-seagull-wings @the-blue-fairie @acidshadow

[brusiocostante]

La gazza ladra (1964). Episodio di “Omaggio a Rossini”, di Giulio Gianin...

[filmsdivisionindia]

Swimmy Directors: Leo Lionni and Giulio Gianini, with Ishu Patel Year: 1966? (5:35)

मैं क्यूँ काला?

A tiny black fish survives a massacre, finds a new crew of red minnows, and organizes them into a collectivist phalanx that wreaks psycho-terror vengeance on the big bad tuna in this beloved, semi-sarkari animated adaptation of Leo Lionni’s Swimmy, a children’s book first published in 1963. Generations of Doordarshan viewers transfixed by its swirling paper cut-outs, undersea landscapes, melancholy piano music and synth bleeps could scarcely have guessed the fascinating backstory to this stylish short, originally produced as a collaborative demonstration project at India’s National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in 1966.

I have written elsewhere about the remarkable first decade of NID, specifically about the role of David Tudor in setting up India’s first electronic music studio there in 1969, complete with the nation’s first Moog modular synthesizer, shipped directly from Moog headquarters in Trumansburg, New York and installed by Tudor, despite his aversion to the technology. Tudor’s visit — so seemingly anomalous — was in fact the consummation of a long-standing relationship between members of the Sarabhai family and pillars of the New York (and international) avant-garde, one that began in 1946 when an impecunious and largely unknown young composer named John Cage was introduced to a visiting Indian student of music named Geeta Sarabhai by their mutual friend Isamu Noguchi.

The Sarabhai family had long been known for its extravagant wealth, its connections with Gandhi and the Indian independence movement, and generations-old commitment to patronage of the arts; during the optimistic two decades following India’s independence these various strands came together, along with a cosmopolitan sensibility that looked outward for inspiration. What resulted in Ahmedabad was an alt-modernist moment: there were buildings designed by Le Corbusier; the planning facilities for India’s space program; Louis Kahn’s design for the IIM-Ahmedabad; a 1964 invitation to the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on its first world tour; and visits from Noguchi and Alexander Calder, among many others, including Charles and Ray Eames. Not the least among these techno-internationalist milestones was the establishment, in 1961, of the National Institute of Design under the leadership of Gautam and Gira Sarabhai, based on recommendations in a 1958 report on design in India by the Eames, (temporarily) housed in one of the Corbusier buildings, and with financial backing from the Ford Foundation.

Ford Foundation dollars were indispensable to the realization of the Sarabhais’ progressive vision for a design pedagogy that fell somewhere between Montessori and the Bauhaus — allowing them to flesh out the Eames Report’s recommendations with the assistance of their first faculty hire, the iconic if little-remembered artist and designer Dashrath Patel. The idea was to keep student-teacher ratios as low as possible in order to recast the relationship between teacher and student as a form of collaboration, eschewing rote, passive learning for project-based “learning by doing.” But the institution was built on foreign exchange in more ways than one: the Ford Foundation’s support enabled NID to import otherwise prohibitively expensive materials and equipment and to host a stream of distinguished visitors. Invite the best for short stays, the thinking went, rather than the mediocre for long. Between 1962 and 1971, the roster of visiting speakers and faculty included stints by Louis Kahn, the Eames, Frei Otto, John Cage, Buckminster Fuller and many others, leaving an indelible imprint on some of the nation’s brightest young designers and future design educators. (A full list can be found here.)

Among these visitors was Leo Lionni, the designer, artist and children’s book author behind “Swimmy.” In 1966, Lionni spent three months teaching at NID in Ahmedabad with his frequent collaborator, an inventive young animator named Giulio Gianini who specialized in the use of cut-out animation long before the technique became mainstream. Gautam Sarabhai had invited them in order “to set up a state-of-the-art animation studio,” an opportunity that Lionni found he “couldn’t resist.”

Lionni was an exceptional figure: a one-time protegé of Marinetti and the Futurists, he made a name for himself in post-war New York as a visionary graphic designer and art director at Fortune magazine — indeed, he gave Andy Warhol one of his first gigs, doing sketches for the Regal Shoes account. Lionni had spent time at Black Mountain College, designed the catalogue for Edward Steichen’s 1955 “The Family of Man” exhibition at MoMA, was close with Calder and Man Ray, and designed the incredible “Unfinished Business” pavilion at the Brussels Worlds Fair in 1958.

But in 1959, at the peak of his career, Lionni left New York and returned to his home in Italy. People thought he was nuts; then something rather wonderful happened. Riding the train one day with his grandchildren, Lionni began to entertain them with scraps of paper he had torn from the pages of Life magazine, moving them around as he improvised a simple story. This experiment led to the publication of his first children’s book Little Blue and Little Yellow. With its modernist use of abstract color, its simple logic and gentle moralizing — not to mention its sense of humor — Little Blue was a precursor to “Swimmy,” published in 1963.

When Lionni and Gianini arrived in Ahmedabad in 1966, they brought “Swimmy” along for the ride. There, together with a small group of first-generation NID faculty and students, including Vikas Satwalekar, Mahendra Patel and future animation-faculty Ishu Patel, they put “Swimmy” on film. I wrote to Satwalekar to see if he remembered how it went down and he graciously replied:

“When the Institute decided to commence an animation programme, it started from scratch and with widest range inputs - to train a faculty to face the challenges of the future. Leo Lionni along with the young and creative animator Gianini came to the campus. Lionni’s publication for children ‘Swimmy’ was to be animated. Ishu Patel was earmarked to be the future animation faculty member so he was apprenticed to Gianini. He was an amazing student, as he quickly mastered the basics and later was sent by the Institute to Canada at NFBC for further training. Mahendra Patel (who was to make a name for himself in the coming years as a renowned typography teacher) and I were apprenticed to Lionni to help create some fillers for the ‘in betweens’ and backdrops developed by Lionni in the hope that his creative spirit of Lionni might just rub off on us! I believe the finishing touches for the film “Swimmy’ were done in Italy.”

The future was a very pressing concern at NID in 1966, but the institute’s own future was soon cast into doubt. The Ford Foundation ended its funding for the institute at the end of the decade — it was even whispered that the affaire de Moog was the last straw — leaving NID dependent on sarkari support. Alas, the heady dawn of NID’s pedagogical program, its foreign visitors and emphasis on collaborative learning, had created an institution that was largely illegible to Indian government types. In October of 1970, hoping to improve the school’s all-important relations with New Delhi, Gautam and Gira Sarabhai appointed a retired admiral named Soman to the newly created post of executive director. 

At the time it seemed like a shrewd move, but relations between the Sarabhais and the Vice Admiral quickly soured. His passions tended more towards military order and callisthenics than Black Mountain style alt-pedagogy. Students and faculty long accustomed to an informal atmosphere were required to arrive early in the day and keep regular hours; these regulations, among others, led to unrest and sit-ins. When the Sarabhais sacked Soman in 1972 he went public with his grievances, leading to sensationalized accounts in the nation’s newspapers, alleging financial mispropriety by the Sarabhais, and worse. “Lid off NID,” screamed a headline in the Times of India. Khushwant Singh covered the firing for the Illustrated Weekly with his usual subtlety: “Man Bites Dog.”

Things gathered enough steam that not one but two committees were appointed by the government to look into the matter, with mixed findings: The Sarabhais were absolved of personal culpability, but the institution was found to be “lacking of purpose.” In 1973, Gautam resigned, and Gira followed. In September of that year, the river rose some 26 feet and flooded the ground floor of the NID buildings to 8 feet. The early days of NID were officially over, and with them, the invitations to the likes of Leo Lionni and Giulio Gianini. The NID gradually transformed itself into a more professional and conventional design school, an incubator for generations of legendary Indian ad men, visual artists, and product designers.

But Swimmy, as always, survives and swims on. This is an essential, if hybrid document from that remarkable period: not quite fully Indian, or sarkari, in origin — as indicated by Satwalekar, it seems to have been completed by Gianini in Italy — it nevertheless gained a sturdy foothold on the Indian imagination through repeated screenings on Doordarshan. And what of Lionni and Gianini’s apprentice, Ishu Patel? Stay tuned, patient readers: an animated masterpiece or two by Patel, coming soon to Sarkari Shorts.

Special bonus: Giulio Gianini’s delightful, neo-Orientalist "L’italiana In Algeri" (1968), a ten-minute animated adaptation of a Rossini overture that he began soon after his return from India, in collaboration with Emanuele Luzzati.

[precipitevolissimevolfermo]