Comment biography Marcelo Rezende
Kiko Mistrorigo and Celia Catunda are part of a generation that found in the mid-1980s São Paulo a favorable environment for thinking other models of TV and relationship with the audience. The period of full redemocratization in the country was accompanied by the emergence of technologies capable of lowering production costs, offering a new repertoire of formal solutions, and, most of all, enabling swift shooting and screening of footage, as a result of the spread of video cameras in increasingly practical, light,and user-friendly formats.
Within this context, considering the large-scale industrial processes of commercial TV channels, different groups came up with the idea of proposing an “independent” production in which producers would be able to test new formats and another relation betweenTV and its viewers. This was the period in which the city of São Paulo witnessed the emergence of projects such as Olhar Eletrônico (whose shows aired on the São Paulo-based channel TV Gazeta), which remained active from 1983 to 1986, and whose team comprised Fernando Meirelles, Marcelo Machado, and Marcelo Tas. Another example was the work of TVCubo, which broadcasted, during that same period, intermittently and illegally, its “pirate” programs in some São Paulo neighborhoods.
These actions, the first of their kind in the recent history of Brazilian telecommunications, led the Mistrorigo and Catunda duo to establish a production company and attemptto start relations with Brazilian television, by offering it a project in which animation would be the language of choice for “trafficking” new forms and contents to viewers, in particular a very special group, comprised of children who, within the national reality, always had in television one of their closest relatives. Thus, TV PinGuim was created by the duo in 1989. Institutionally speaking, the mission statement was expressed as follows: a production company capable of developing quality content for TV, video, and cinema. They started working with various animation techniques, such as stop motion, 2-D, and 3-D.
In 1993, they worked on the Nome project alongside Arnaldo Antunes and Zaba Moreau. Their assigned task was to devise an animation for Antunes’ verses, creating a series of videos for the artist’s poems and songs. In that same year, they created the Poemas animados series for the Castelo Rá-Tim-Bum TV show. Once again, they attempted to expandthe meanings, the possibilities of poetry, now targeting the child audience. When choosing the poems and poets to be worked with, they decided to avoid rhymes and verses written “for children.” The aim was to give these viewers a chance of having an intelligent, nonreductionist dialogue.
Other animated series shown on educational TV channels were created afterwards: Rita(1994), O direito do trabalhador, De onde vem [Where does it come from] (2002), Entre pais e filhos [Parents and kids, 2002–2003], up until the emergence of their most popular character, the Fishtronaut (2009), which is becoming very popular worldwide. Currently,TV PinGuim’s animations and projects are present in more than sixty different nations.
Throughout their career, the duo sought to explore something that has been present ever since their early productions: the Brazilian social and historical conditions are so different than those of the leading television and cinema production hubs that what is regarded as shortcomings (the lack of proprietary technology, of space for working, or of fields for a true dialogue with viewers) may be converted into a tool.
Now, Kiko Mistrorigo and Celia Catunda are preparing to take a dive, via animation, into the realm, landscapes, and thinking of Brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973). Tarsilinha will be a project that will be able to encompass different media: cinema, TV, Web site, books, and other new media still being experimented with. Painting, poetry, and a new way of dealing with national cultural heritage.