Quirino Cristiani

Quirino Cristiani (July 2, 1896 – August 2, 1984) was an Italian-born 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, even though the only copies of these two films were lost in a fire. He is also the first person to create animation solely using cardboard cutouts.

Quirino Cristiani was born on July 2, 1896, in Santa Giuletta, 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 porteño first (as the natives of the port of Buenos Aires called themselves) and an Argentine second.

As a teenager, he developed a passion for drawing, which led him through a brief course with the Academy of Fine Arts to the publication of political caricatures for the city newspapers. Soon the perfect target for his satire presented himself.

The national elections of 1916 peacefully ended the thirty-six-year-long rule of the Conservative party and placed Radical party leader Hipólito Yrigoyen in the President's seat. Yrigoyen favored the lower middle class, especially in Buenos Aires, and granted unprecedented freedom to the press. The press in response turned on him, mocking his social awkwardness, his replacement of Conservative corruption with Radical corruption in the government, and his decision to keep Argentina out of World War I, a decision that was unpopular with the germanophile Argentine military. He was soon dubbed "Peludo" ("shaggy") for his lack of personal grooming (with the additional slang meaning of "idiot").

Living in the capital was another Italian immigrant, Federico 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 porteños were not. He hired the twenty-year-old Cristiani off the street, gave him Émile Cohl's Les Allumettes animées (Animated Matches, 1908) 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 Intervención en la provincia 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.

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