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Quirino Cristiani
Topics: Argentine animators Argentine cartoonists Italian-Argentines
Quirino Cristiani 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 porteno first (as the natives of the port of Buenos Aires called themselves) and an Argentinian second.
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 portenos were not. He hired the twenty-year old Cristiani off the street, gave him Emile Cohl's Les Allumettes animees to teach him the 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 Intervencion 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 article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Quirino Cristiani
