Amazing early animation work from Brazil. It is really sad that only a 1-minute fragment has survived. It had the same level and style of top animators such as Walt Disney, Fleischer brothers, and Otto Messmer.
2 Reviews
Brazilian Fleischer
guisreis8 July 2021
A rare pioneering event
Rodrigo_Amaro3 June 2022
I was watching a 1970's short documentary about the great cartoonist Luiz Sá and all of sudden there was a part in it saying that Walt Disney
wanted to see his animation works. Sá was beginning to create short animation after a decade making cartoons for newspaper and magazines, presenting
his style with round characters and all, but thanks to the then propaganda and press department of Vargas era told him to not show his short films to
Disney because they were too amateurish, of low quality and he complied. He directed two shorts: one which was sold to some guy and is probably lost in
some mansion or vanished from view for good; the other is this movie which appears in the documentary - actually, what it exists of the short, mere one
minute of the two filmed.
"As Aventuras de Virgolino" has a very simple story that has been seeing thousands of times in other animations, cartoons and even feature films where a bad guy kidnaps a beautiful girl and the hero comes to her rescue. And during the chase the animation presents humored situations such as the bad guy's car developing eyes and a mouth while speeding away from the hero. It's cliched but it's fun.
The point of admiration of this piece - that still exists and easily available - is that here we can witness an early animated project, quite pioneer in Brazil and one that carries the same weight and quality from Betty Boop pieces or similar, yet it has the same essence and designs as conceived by Luiz Sá. And the man and his crew must have spent hundreds of hours making this incredibly short film, of which, sadly, does not contain the ending.
So, considering the fact back in the 1930's we didn't have much of an industry like Disney, this one was a special thing. The censors who blocked its showing to Walt Disney should have been ashamed of themselves because this short was really good and the talent of Sá could have been recognised by a heavyweight in the film industry and his career would have go to extreme lenghts, bigger than he already is in here. 9/10.
"As Aventuras de Virgolino" has a very simple story that has been seeing thousands of times in other animations, cartoons and even feature films where a bad guy kidnaps a beautiful girl and the hero comes to her rescue. And during the chase the animation presents humored situations such as the bad guy's car developing eyes and a mouth while speeding away from the hero. It's cliched but it's fun.
The point of admiration of this piece - that still exists and easily available - is that here we can witness an early animated project, quite pioneer in Brazil and one that carries the same weight and quality from Betty Boop pieces or similar, yet it has the same essence and designs as conceived by Luiz Sá. And the man and his crew must have spent hundreds of hours making this incredibly short film, of which, sadly, does not contain the ending.
So, considering the fact back in the 1930's we didn't have much of an industry like Disney, this one was a special thing. The censors who blocked its showing to Walt Disney should have been ashamed of themselves because this short was really good and the talent of Sá could have been recognised by a heavyweight in the film industry and his career would have go to extreme lenghts, bigger than he already is in here. 9/10.
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