Giacomo’s Secret

Aaaah, now here’s a feature film I’m looking forward to, “Giacomo’s Secret” supervised by the talented Sergio pablos over at Animagicfilms. They created another feature a while back called “Los Reyes Magos” or “The Three Wise Men” and to be honost I believe that it had allot of potential to have become a good movie but it didn’t have that finished feeling yet, some of the animation was lacking a little. Nevertheless, of what I’ve seen of this feature it has all the potential to put Sergio Pablos’s studio on the map. The animation looks great and the synopsis is interesting and fresh enough. It’s the sorta feature that I would love to work on and even tho I will propably not, I still hope it will become a good movie so I can go watch it.

This is the story :

 

 

Tuscany, 1948, Giacomo, a small-time con man, uses the old legend of a medieval knight to swindle the people in the towns he passes thought. In one of them, he makes the fatal mistake of fleecing the Questore Capoferro, a proud and fearsome police inspector who will pursue him implacably. In his crazy flight, the con man crosses paths with Nino, a seven-year-old orphan whose only possesion is an old photograph of a captain next to his ship. The boy is looking for this man, convinced that he is his father.

 

As luck will have it, Nino is made to think that Giacomo is in reality the knight from his own story, and asks for his aid in his quest to find his father. The con man, seeing every escape route cut off, figures that the captain will help him get away on his ship in gratitude for bringing his son back to him. From that moment on, Giacomo pretends to be the knight from the popular legend for Nino.

 

During a trip full of wild adventures, Nino’s innocence and candor begin to soften the con man’s heart, and an endearing relationship emerges between the two. But Giacomo’s past comes back to haunt him as the implacable Capoferro hunts him down. The swindler knows he should escape, but that would mean parting from Nino, who has come to feel real affection for.

 

When Capoferro uses little Nino to lure the fugitive into a trap, Giacomo gives up his chance to escape in order to rescue the boy. In a climax packed with emotion, Giacomo saves the boy, and Nino ends up finding in Giacomo the father that he has longed for.

And here’s the trailer for you guys :

And the characters :

 

Ciao

Modern animation

From the Animation archive :

The animator today is supplying a number of drawings, as few as possible in support of a soundtrack, as tightly packed with dialogue as possible. Today’s TV cartoon show can accurately be identified as visual radio. The proof is quickly at hand. Turn off the picture and listen. If you can follow the story at all, you are listening to radio and the picture is only there to justify it being on TV in the first place- a more acceptable medium in this cultured world. If you can turn the sound off, and follow such action, the chances are you are watching a good, if old movie on TV. The effect is basically visual, not auditory. If it is an animated cartoon and you can follow such action, you are probably watching either the Walt Disney show, the Bugs Bunny show, old MGM cartoons or products of the Golden Age of Animation, where the accent was on full animation.

Pantomime can only be successful by full animation- animation pure, animation simple, it is impossible to fake. You must have an educated animator, one who has done what is neccessary to become an animator, and that is a ten year minimal stint as assistant animator, junior animator, journeyman animator and perhaps master animator. It is difficult to become a competent actor, but it is more difficult to become an animator. He must be able to DRAW action, whether it be an elephant, a housefly, a pterodactyl, or a sugar-plum fairy.

The tragic aspect of all this is contained in the realization that there is no master animator in this country or perhaps in the world who is under 40, and most are over 50. Unless there is a resurgence of demand for animation, all the able artists will be gone and a great craft with a great potential will perish too. But if, perhaps, we are doomed to extinction, we will at least know the logic of why we go to join the dodo, the giant ground sloth, the pterodactyl and the whooping crane- all of these animals were obviously invented by animators in the first place.

Which brings me to the “Dinosaur” part of this little paper. I decided that if animators, like dinosaurs, were becoming extinct, then I would face it cheerfully, but sink into oblivion in character. I would rather die as a dinosaur than live as a fox. The spastic cut-outs of today’s “animation” are for those who can stomach them, but do not, I ask you, disgrace a great craft by calling what you do “modern” and do not call yourselves “animators”. It is a proud name and should be reserved for those who find pride in it.

-Chuck Jones, 1964