At times people ask me: “okay, but why this obsession with old American cartoons?”
Well, cartoons are the way of storytelling that has always come most naturally, pleasantly, and spontaneously to me, and those “primitive” ones have a special charm, a very strong evocative power. I was pleasantly surprised to find how much this perception is shared even by very young people, both in age and culture, who are light years away from that period. Of course, in the following decades, there were also amazing cartoons drawn, true masterpieces. But those from the ’20s and ’30s, the music that accompanied them, have (at least for me) something extra. They’re not vintage, they’re truly “ancient”: they represent an era and the origins of a world, they are almost mythical archetypes. In cartoon language, they correspond to the “land far, far away” of fairy tales.