We are celebrating the centenary of Emanuele Luzzati’s birth with a selection of animated shorts that are the fruit of the artistic collaboration between the art director and illustrator from Genoa and the director and animator Giulio Gianini. Driven by passion and inexhaustible, childlike curiosity, Luzzati experienced and experimented with art in all its varied forms – from theatre to sculpture and from children’s illustrations to the cinema.
His collaboration with Giulio Gianini began almost as a game, thanks to a puppet theatre with which Gianini liked to entertain friends and relatives and for which Luzzati painted the proscenium. But puppet theatre was only one of the pair’s many interests: opera, classic fairytales and commedia dell’arte represent the common ground from which their highly original animated world took shape. Our selection includes their celebrated Rossini trilogy – La gazza ladra, L’italiana in Algeri and Pulcinella – and several of their enchanting shorts based on traditional popular fairy tales. In these films, all the elements of their poetics are evident: the theatrical mise-en-scène, the stylised two-dimensional images, the vivid colours, and the fluidity and dynamism of the animation.

LA GAZZA LADRA
(Italy/1964) by Giulio Gianini, Emanuele Luzzati (11’)

PULCINELLA
(Italy/1973) by Giulio Gianini, Emanuele Luzzati (12’)

L’ITALIANA IN ALGERI
(Italy/1968) by Giulio Gianini, Emanuele Luzzati (10’)