Women in Movie Animation
Edited by Matilde Tortora, Tunué Editors, 2010

Contributes of: Massimo Becattini, Paolo Di Girolamo, Ursula Ferrara, Andrea Fontana, Gibba, Marcel Jean, Yves Josso, Regina Pessoa, Julie Roy, Davide Tarò, Nunziante Valoroso, Mario Verger

The book, just published, edited by the scholar Matilde Tortora, reveals the great debt the cinema of animation owes to the great creativity of woman artist of drawing, of film-camera and of audiovisual narrative. It starts from the pioneers of animation to present through various excursus referred to scholars of different nationalities, relative to works of authoresses of various countries and ages. At first, few pioneers apply to film of animation, only later many women are applied in secondary roles, inkers, colouring, cutters.

This anthology contains papers of absolute novelty, photos and documents from important Italian and foreign “archives”, from Indelli/de Roubaix archive, from National Film Board of Canada , from Gibba, Paolo Di Girolamo (the founding fathers of Italian Animation of the ‘50ies, and many “carosello” – an Italian type of TV publicity from which for the first time the kind of contribution of women can be seen) and from several other archives.

Two great hailed authoresses of world animation, Regina Pessoa (Portugal) and Signe Baumane (Latvia/USA) contributed to the book with original drawings illustrating the double cover, in the center there is the tale in images made by the great authoress Ursula Ferrara (Italy) on “some unaware maestros of my special passion for the cinema of animation” a “petite histoire”, irony, drawings, colours, art; and the tale of Regina Pessoa “Me, Animation, Life” a luminous text, intense, necessary, and beautiful just as her animated films.