Michael Sporn Animation – Splog » Fellini’s Cartoons

– Continuing yesterday’s thread of cartoon/storyboard material and their relationship . . .

- Everyone in the film business should know Federico Fellini‘s films, but I wonder how many know that Fellini was an artist. He was primarily interested in being a cartoonist and aimed his career in that direction. He did a number of comic strips, a lot of caricatures and spot cartoons.

(Fellini in his studio drawing.)(Below, a comic strip Fellini did in 1940.)
-
It was only during World War II that he got caught up in a group of film makers and put all of his energies into motion pictures. However, this didn’t stop him from drawing.

Fellini did poster designs for many of his films, storyboarded sections of his movies and caricatured many of his actors. He frequently did cartoons on his sets – many of them quite risquÃ©.

The Voyage of Mastorna was a graphic novel he did in collaboration with Milo Manara. Fellini storyboarded his part and Manara reworked the boards into the book.

Fellini wrote this about the book:

When did I first think of a story for a movie like that of the Voyage of Mastorna?
I can’t remember. I have always believed that my movies were awaiting me, all finished and ready, the way a station waits for a train that is pulling in. . . .
. . . Just as I, a director, can now talk about a film that I have made. The problem is that I never made Mastorna. It is a story that has accompanied me for almost thirty years and, as I have said many times, helped to shape, with ideas that belonged to it and it alone, nearly all the movies that I made in its place. A stimulating, fascinating presence, with perhaps I did not know how to live without. A pilot ship that would guide me out of the harbour, obliging me to take different voyages, to face unknown adventures. In other words, to make other movies. And so, Signor Fellini, why have you decided to abandon once and for all that story if it was.

Here is a section of the book. On the left Fellini’s board, on the right Manara’s reworking:

1a 1b
(Click on any image to enlarge.)