Peludo City (1931)

Peludópolis

The story of Argentine President Hipolito Yrigoyen's corrupt government and its overthrow by a military coup. Yrigoyen floats around in his boat Peludo City (which represented Argentina) while constantly being harassed by hungry sharks (the Radicals). The film was released with a Vitaphone sound-on-disc synchronization system soundtrack, making the film generally credited as the first animated feature film with sound. It is now considered a lost film, along with several of Cristiani's films which were destroyed in fires in 1957 and 1961.

Date of release
1931-09-16
TMDB
7.0 / 10 (1)
Runtime
1h 20m
Genres
Animation
Director
Quirino Cristiani

Interesting facts

Peludópolis is a 1931 Argentine animated film directed by Quirino Cristiani. It was released on 18 September 1931 in Buenos Aires. The film was released with a Vitaphone sound-on-disc synchronization system soundtrack, making the film generally credited as the first animated feature film with sound. The film is now considered a lost film.

Production

A year into production for the film, president Yrigoyen was ousted by a military coup d'état, and production on the film halted.

Still wanting this film to see the light of day, Cristiani began de-emphasizing Yrigoyen and the sharks and started adding in the generals that overthrew Yrigoyen as the heroes. During this time, Cristiani added an everyman character named Juan Pueblo to act as the moral center of the film. After the delay and plot rearrangement, Peludópolis was finally released on 16 September 1931.

The single most notable feature of Peludópolis was that it was the first animated film to be released with sound. Cristiani added this feature partway through production, before the plot had been rearranged, using the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system to record the sound that was to play alongside the film. While sound-on-film systems did exist at the time, Argentine theaters were simply unable to support the system.

Instead of drawing on cels which would then be laid over a background, the drawings were made on cardboard, a technique Cristiani by then had perfected, and then cut out and laid over the background in the same way as with cels.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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