Pagot, Gavioli, Manzi: Cartoons with the Pirelli Hallmark
While visiting the 33rd Turin Motor Show in April 1951, the president of the Italian Republic, Luigi Einaudi, must certainly have stopped to admire the latest from the Italian automotive industry. He would have seen models like the Lancia Aurelia Gran Turismo, which was designed to give another new entry, the Alfa Romeo 1900 Touring Coupé, a tough time at the Mille Miglia. Then he would have gone to the Pirelli stand, where he would have seen the premiere of Novità al Salone Internazionale dell’Auto di Torino (“The Latest from the International Motor Show in Turin”), a delightful animated film in which a car wins a coveted “Gran Premio” by beating wonderfully original models like the MacPerson AntiCrash, the Alpestren Machine for climbing mountains, and the Frou Frou for scintillating soubrettes. And all this thanks to Pirelli Stelvio tyres – safe when braking and in the wet. The animated advertising film was specially made for Pirelli by the Pagot Film production company under the direction of its founder Nino Pagot. Working with his younger brother Toni, Nino Pagot grew up with the school of so-called “Italian Disneys”, who had been born before the war, and by 1951 he was already a successful cartoonist. The effervescent 1950s were now pushing towards the cinema cartoon as a prime means of expression and Pirelli was one of the first companies to believe in the work of the Pagot brothers: Novità al Salone dell’Auto was a prize-winner at the Second Congress of Advertising in Genoa and it won the Prime Minister’s Cup for the best advertising film at the Second International Film Festival.
Pagot’s four-minute cartoon also had the guidance of Leonardo Sinisgalli, who was editor of Pirelli magazine at the time, together with Arturo Tofanelli. And it was in issue number 3 of 1952, in June, in an article entitled “Considerations on Advertising Films” that the film critic Vittorio Bonicelli held up Novità al Salone as an example of “intelligent direct advertising, in which the theme of the product being advertised permeates the entire film with good taste and talent, in the form of a witty little lesson on road traffic.” The Pagot brothers later went over to television and to the early evening Carosello advertising programme launched by RAI in 1957 – making no small contribution to the history of Italian cartoons. For the programme, the Pagots found themselves up against another great creative couple of those years: the brothers Gino and Roberto Gavioli and their Gamma Film. Now came Pirelli’s most famous Carosello commercials: the cartoons with “Mammut, Babbut, Figliut”, a family of cave-dwellers who publicised both the prodigious Gommapiuma product and the Sempione and Cinturato tyres. The three cave-dwellers’ outlandish adventures were a regular feature on television for Italians between 1962 and 1965: two minutes of endless troubles – accompanied by pure Palaeolithic grunts – until at last a little man would arrive and invariably caution that “we’re aren’t in the Stone Age any more!”, while the advertisement at the end would invite viewers to enter the modern world of rubber. During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, in particular, Papa Babbut showed off his skills in a disastrous but hilarious series of sports performances.
Also in 1962, however, the brilliant Pagot brothers produced another form of expression in advertising: the “diavive”, a series of slides mounted in sequence to form short animated films, with the spoken word, sound and colour. Diavive were made for cinema screens, lasted 26 seconds, and ended with the name of the tyre dealer who sponsored the screening. And above all, the drawings for the diavive bear the name of a master of advertising design, Riccardo Manzi.
While visiting the 33rd Turin Motor Show in April 1951, the president of the Italian Republic, Luigi Einaudi, must certainly have stopped to admire the latest from the Italian automotive industry. He would have seen models like the Lancia Aurelia Gran Turismo, which was designed to give another new entry, the Alfa Romeo 1900 Touring Coupé, a tough time at the Mille Miglia. Then he would have gone to the Pirelli stand, where he would have seen the premiere of Novità al Salone Internazionale dell’Auto di Torino (“The Latest from the International Motor Show in Turin”), a delightful animated film in which a car wins a coveted “Gran Premio” by beating wonderfully original models like the MacPerson AntiCrash, the Alpestren Machine for climbing mountains, and the Frou Frou for scintillating soubrettes. And all this thanks to Pirelli Stelvio tyres – safe when braking and in the wet. The animated advertising film was specially made for Pirelli by the Pagot Film production company under the direction of its founder Nino Pagot. Working with his younger brother Toni, Nino Pagot grew up with the school of so-called “Italian Disneys”, who had been born before the war, and by 1951 he was already a successful cartoonist. The effervescent 1950s were now pushing towards the cinema cartoon as a prime means of expression and Pirelli was one of the first companies to believe in the work of the Pagot brothers: Novità al Salone dell’Auto was a prize-winner at the Second Congress of Advertising in Genoa and it won the Prime Minister’s Cup for the best advertising film at the Second International Film Festival.
Pagot’s four-minute cartoon also had the guidance of Leonardo Sinisgalli, who was editor of Pirelli magazine at the time, together with Arturo Tofanelli. And it was in issue number 3 of 1952, in June, in an article entitled “Considerations on Advertising Films” that the film critic Vittorio Bonicelli held up Novità al Salone as an example of “intelligent direct advertising, in which the theme of the product being advertised permeates the entire film with good taste and talent, in the form of a witty little lesson on road traffic.” The Pagot brothers later went over to television and to the early evening Carosello advertising programme launched by RAI in 1957 – making no small contribution to the history of Italian cartoons. For the programme, the Pagots found themselves up against another great creative couple of those years: the brothers Gino and Roberto Gavioli and their Gamma Film. Now came Pirelli’s most famous Carosello commercials: the cartoons with “Mammut, Babbut, Figliut”, a family of cave-dwellers who publicised both the prodigious Gommapiuma product and the Sempione and Cinturato tyres. The three cave-dwellers’ outlandish adventures were a regular feature on television for Italians between 1962 and 1965: two minutes of endless troubles – accompanied by pure Palaeolithic grunts – until at last a little man would arrive and invariably caution that “we’re aren’t in the Stone Age any more!”, while the advertisement at the end would invite viewers to enter the modern world of rubber. During the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, in particular, Papa Babbut showed off his skills in a disastrous but hilarious series of sports performances.
Also in 1962, however, the brilliant Pagot brothers produced another form of expression in advertising: the “diavive”, a series of slides mounted in sequence to form short animated films, with the spoken word, sound and colour. Diavive were made for cinema screens, lasted 26 seconds, and ended with the name of the tyre dealer who sponsored the screening. And above all, the drawings for the diavive bear the name of a master of advertising design, Riccardo Manzi.
