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- Eugen Ionesco – Fighting The Absurd With Its Own WeaponsAna Aslan – The Fight Against AgingNadia Comaneci – The Mark of PerfectionBlack Tourism in RomaniaRomanian Comedy PlaysHenri Coanda – Father of the JetGopo – A Romanian Walt DisneyGeorge Emil Palade – The Romanian Nobel PrizeRomanian Touches In World CulturePetrache Poenaru – Inventor Of The Fountain PenEmil Racovita – A Scientist With A Taste For AdventureUnforgettable Romanian MoviesThe Story of The LipovansJean Negulesco – A Romanian at HollywoodThe Romanian Book MarketMihai Eminescu – the Genius of Romanian LiteratureRomania’s Eye for ArtMaria Tănase – the Voice of Romanian FolkloreTraditional Hand Made Crafts Fair in OradeaPetreus Brothers“Police, adjective” – Another Memorable Movie by Corneliu PorumboiuBranding RomaniaReaping Dreams with Paula SelingThe Concert Market in RomaniaTransylvania Film Festival – Celebrating Film for 8 YearsOina – Romanian baseballBoogie – One Movie, an Universal StoryIndependenta Romaniei, The First Romanian Full Length MovieBucharest Days – Taking a Walk Through Bucharest’s History
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Gopo – A Romanian Walt Disney
In 1957, a short animated film, about a strange little man, created by an unknown Romanian artist named Ioan Popescu-Gopo (1923-1989), won the greatest prize for this section at the Cannes Festival.
Ioan Popescu was born in Bucharest in 1923 and he got his nickname “Gopo” from the abbreviation of his parents’ last names – Gorenco (his mother) and Popescu (his father). He made his artistic debut in 1939 by drawing caricatures in different newspapers. He attended the courses of the Art Academy from Bucharest, but never graduated; what he succeeded in graduating was an animation course he followed in Moscow.
There are early proofs of his talent – his friends used to draw three dots on a sheet of paper, told him that those were the nose or a leg and challenged him to create a naked woman, starting from them. Needless to say, he always succeeded, no matter how far or strange the dots were placed.
Ioan Popescu-Gopo made his debut in animation movies in 1949 together with his father and another pioneer in this field, Matty Aslan, by creating a short animated film, “Punguta cu doi bani” (“The Bag with Two Coins”), a free adaptation of a popular story by Ion Creanga. In 1950, he started working for the Movie Studio from Bucharest and realized some educational animated films.
As he activated in the same field as the legendary Walt Disney, Popescu-Gopo was one of his great admirers, but he also strived to produce equally masterful animations. As he himself confessed, understanding that he could never match the American’s technical achievements, he decided to make anti-Disney movies, ones that didn’t distinguish themselves by color, grace or beauty, but by subject.
This is how Gopo’s Little Man appeared. This character is a schematized human, with a long head and with no facial features than two dots as the eyes, a circle as the nose and a line as the mouth. His first story was named Scurta Istorie (Short History) and it presents a strange and unique perspective upon the cosmogony and upon the evolution of life on Earth.
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