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His name was forever and ever sealed to the taunts and jokes of Zipi and Zape, but there was a time, in 1950, when Josep Escobar Salient (1908-1994), cartoonist with a friendly gesture and an always smoking pipe, temporarily left the lane of Bruguera to fight copper with none other than the almighty Disney. how they feel it A designer with a visionary spirit and the soul of an inventor (his is, for example, the projector About Skob) against the animated and technicolor dream factory.
The thing, of course, turned out to be regular, so what follows is the story of what could have been and was not. An unequal duel that ended with Walt Disney’s ‘Cinderella’ bursting at the box office and garnering its biggest commercial success since its premiere ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ in 1937, and ‘Once upon a time…’, a film by Escobar and Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, buried alive despite being, in short, a “super-production of cartoons in Cinefotocolor”.
Released in 1950, the two films started from the same place and proposed the transfer to the big screen of the story of Charles Perrault, but Disney moved forward when it came to registering the title. As in Sean Connery’s ‘The Immortals’, there could be only one Cinderella, so Escobar and Cirici Pellicer’s ambitious project would have to settle for a less flashy name. One like ‘Once upon a time…’.
dust and oblivion
“The temporal coincidence with the adaptation made by the almighty Disney, who registered the title, forced its release as ‘Once upon a time …’ and condemned an ambitious project to ostracism and oblivion”, complain from Film Library of Catalonia, institution that set out to bring this lost classic of Spanish animation back to life. A film that, carefully restored, returns to theaters on December 16 after spending last summer at the San Sebastian Film Festival.
Seven decades of dust, oblivion and fleeing color eventually turned ‘Once Upon a Time…’ into a relic, but the film was born in its time as an ambitious project destined to make history. «This is the second Spanish animated feature, a response to ‘chickpeas from La Mancha’, also made in Barcelona years earlier but with an absolutely opposite ideological sign”, underlines the director of the Filmoteca, Esteve Riambau.
Thus, while the film by José María Blay, blessed by the Franco regime, tried to exalt the patriotic values of the moment, “Once upon a time…” was born from the impulse of Catalan personalities such as Josep Baguñá, son of the editor of the magazine satirical ‘Cu-Cut!’ and “En Patufet” for children; and Félix Millet Maristany, promoter of the Orfeó Català and patron of Catalan culture. That’s why the film includes unveiled nods, like that dance scene with real characters starring Manuel Cubeles’ Esbart Verdaguer.
Alexandre Cirici Pellicer, artistic director, provided a pictorial background inspired by the Renaissance. And Escobar, who had just given birth Carpanta (1947) already Zipi and Zape (1948), took care of designing and creating the characters as well as introducing new animation techniques such as rotoscoping, which made the movements of the drawings more credible. «Thanks to the enthusiasm and expertise of the Director of Animation, the well-known cartoonist José Escobar, and his collaborators, the animators Ferrándiz, Fresquet, Tur, Sevillano, Dibán, etc… we believe we have demonstrated that, in Spain, the problem of ‘movement’ in animated films can be considered definitively resolved, thus providing a new advance to national cinematography, which in the field of cartoons places it at a much higher level than its Hispanic-American sisters, and in first, perhaps, from Europe”, read the enthusiastic file that the censorship dedicated to the film. “The film seems to have come out of the sweet godmother’s magic wand,” observes the press of the moment with considerable satisfaction.
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In fact, none of this was new to Escobar, who had previously worked as an animator for the Hispanic Graphic Films, the CEIDA (International Spanish Cinematography Cartoons) e Cartoon chamartin. More: in 1934 he had made the animated short ‘La rateta que escombrava l’escaleta’ with the photographer José Bosch. Prosecuted by the Franco regime for collaborating with ‘L’Esquella de la Torratxa’, he was imprisoned in La Modelo for a year and a half and lost his post as an official in the Post Office, which prompted him, happy irony, to devote himself completely to humor and comics. ‘Once Upon a Time…’ was, in fact, one of his last forays into animation.
From Venice to restoration
647 plans, 370,000 drawings, 25,000 celluloid, 1,815 kilos of colors and 1,600 brushes ended up. And behind it there was also a film that went from critical acclaim and Special Mention at the Venice Film Festival to the trance of having to deal with Disney on the one hand and the government’s disinterest on the other. “The slightest official and economic support from the Classification Commission, rectified only after it passed to the Venice Film Festival, has condemned the film to ostracism,” complains Riambau. Its release was limited to eight copies of 35mm and a handful of cheap 16mm and black and white tapes to show in schools and religious centres.
From these modest prints (35mm negatives and originals have been lost over the years), the Filmoteca de Catalunya undertook a complex recovery process in 2014 which, eight years later, has now led to a renewed and restored version. . A team made up of the curator Rosa Cardona, the restorer Luciano Berriatúa and the engineer and sound technician Enric Giné, took care of recovering the tonality of the voices and music of the time, as well as reintroducing color from the original frames. in the hands of collectors. A detective work that brings back to its original state an emblem of Spanish animation nerd from the Disney factory. As Escobar himself summarized in an interview shortly before his death: «It wasn’t right! We started and Mr. Disney had it all!”
