The past and present of the Argentine animation film industry — which pioneered the genre in the earliest years of the 20th century — is now the object of a special series of screenings this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in New York City.

Curated by guest programmer Juan Manuel Domínguez and the Buenos Aires Film Museum, MoMi’s The Many Wonderful Lives of Argentine Animation series will play on November 2 and 3, divided into four programs, each featuring a range of short films, from early silent shorts for kids to popular TV shows, commercials, and contemporary works.

“The idea is to paint one of the dozens of possible pictures you can paint about Argentine animation, which is pretty unique in terms of its connection to the history of cinema and the passion about this particular art medium,” Domínguez told the Herald.

The first program, A Hundred Years of Argentine Animated Films, is a selection of works from classical animators such as Juan Oliva, Jose Burone Bruché, and Jorge Caro, and self-taught pioneers like Luis Bras or Quirino Cristiani, the creator of the first feature-length animated film in history, The Apostle. A political satire premiered in 1917, the film is believed to be lost after a fire destroyed the Valle film laboratories in the late 1920s.

You may also be interested in: Top animation festival BitBang kicks off in Buenos Aires 

Back to the present, the second program, Hey, Kids: Cartoons from Argentina!, features films from the last two decades of Argentine animated cinema, focused on younger viewers.  

“Names like Juan Pablo Zaramella or Irene Blei define not only the present situation of Argentine animation, its awards, and different trends but also a way of doing animation in a country that perhaps never promoted it as strongly as the current activity would make us believe,” said Domínguez.

“There are names from every era, every decade, and that’s what we want to show.”

Zaramella’s stop-motion series The Tiniest Man in the World and his short film Journey To Mars, are featured in program 2, while his 2011 hybrid short film Luminaris — a winner of audience and critics awards at the Annecy Film Festival — is screening in program 3, Teenage Mutant Argentine Animation!

The fourth program is entirely focused on works by Manuel García Ferré, an iconic Argentine animator who created classic characters like Hijitus, as well as comic books, commercials, and children’s magazine Anteojito, the longest-running magazine of its kind in Latin American history. 

The Adventures of Hijitus and Don Manuel García Ferré gathers episodes of the animated TV show The Adventures of Hijitus — a gentle and playful take on superheroes — as well as commercials and a work-in-progress short starring García Ferré’s absurd character Pi-Pío that is being screened for the first time in the US.

The Many Wonderful Lives of Argentine Animation is on from November 2–3 at the Museum of the Moving Image. Tickets for each program can be purchased at the MoMI website.