From October 6th to 15th, the Sitges – International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia and the Spanish Society of Authors and Publishers (SGAE) are celebrating Spanish animated moviemaking with the exhibition Animation! From The Enchanted Sword to Robot Dreams. The exhibition is open to the public at the Miramar Cultural Center (c/Davallada, 12) in Sitges.
“The Animation! exhibition is incredibly thorough”, says Ángel Sala, the Festival’s Director. “I want to thank the SGAE for their collaboration and efforts to bring important exhibitions to Sitges, and I hope we will continue to collaborate on future initiatives”. According to Sala, “Animation is a tremendously powerful audiovisual language. In our country there are great auteurs in the fields of film, television, advertising… With major international recognition”.
Maribel Sausor, curator of Animation! and director of the SGAE’s Complementary Activities Department, hopes that the public will enjoy the exhibition.
“It outlines a journey through the great milestones of animation, from its beginnings in the year 45, to Robot Dreams, which will be released in December 2023, and Dragonkeeper, which will be released in 2024”. Sausor points out that “Animation isn’t just a genre, it’s a way of telling stories.”
The exhibition, illustrated with a poster by José Luis Ágreda, proposes a journey through the milestones of Spanish animation over its more than 100 years of history, from the early works created by precursors such as Arturo Moreno (auteur of The Enchanted Sword, the first Spanish animated feature film and the first one in color in Europe) or Alexandre Cirici-Pellicer (with Once Upon a Time…) to the most recent prodigies of this genre, such as Pablo Berger (who with his Robot Dreams won the Contrechamp Grand Prix at the Annecy International Film Festival in 2023), Enrique Gato (creator of the character Tadeo Jones, with which he sold out box offices and won half a dozen Goya awards) or the duo formed by Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal (who in early October will release They Shot the Piano Player, after the success of their Chico & Rita).
Animation! presents a multitude of pieces that provide a complete panoramic view of this film genre, such as pencil sketches and ink drawings of the main characters from The Enchanted Sword (Arturo Moreno and José Mª Blay, 1945), the Stuk film projector, created in 1952 by Escobar, the real figure of Ruperta the pumpkin, mascot of the television program Un, dos, tres…, the original scripts from the cartoon series Don Quijote de la Mancha (Cruz Delgado, 1979) and Around the World with Willy Fog (Luis Ballester and Fumio Kurokawa, 1983), the original pencil and watercolor storyboard from Unicon Wars (Alberto Vázquez, 2022), and character and set designs from Wrinkles, a feature film based on the graphic novel with which Paco Roca won the National Comic Award (Ignacio Ferreras, 2011) and from the film Black is Beltza (Fermin Muguruza, 2018), to name just a few.
The exhibition is completed with contributions from specialists in this field, such as Jordi Sánchez Navarro (professor and researcher at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, and programmer of the Anima’t section at the Sitges Film Festival), Pedro Medina (co-editor of Caimán Cuadernos de Cine) and Adrián Encinas (author of the book Historia del cine de animación. Stop-motion español 1912-1975), among others, who analyze the different stages of Spanish animation and its contribution to the global panorama. So, Animation! begins its journey with the precursors of this type of cinema, after the Civil War, and the subsequent boom of this genre, driven since the early 80s by popular TV series such as David the Gnome, Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds or Ruy, the Little Cid. And along the way, the exhibition also takes a look at the stop motion technique, the emergence of animation for adult audiences or experimental independent cinema, to culminate in the most recent productions with an international focus.