07/30/2025
Many people believe Disney's 1937 film Snow White was the world's first ever animated feature film - but it wasn't.
That honour goes to Italian-born Quirino Cristiani - a genius raised in Argentina and largely forgotten by history, whose works have mostly been destroyed.
In 1917, twenty years before the release of Snow White, an animated feature called El Ápostol (The Apostle) packed cinemas in Argentina. It's creator was 21-year-old Cristiani.
Cristiani started as a cartoonist for newspapers. He then began making cartoons for cinema, developing a method of animation using cardboard cut-outs. He used his technique to devastating effect in The Apostle, a political satire on corruption and ambition.
More movies followed, but a military coup in Argentina meant Cristiani had to tone down his satire.
Then, as he was near to retiring in 1941, a certain Walt Disney came to South America. Disney couldn't believe that Cristiani was making films so efficiently, and offered him a job. But Cristiani refused.
His grandson Hector Cristiani says, "I always asked him, why didn't you go? He said, he had never flown on a plane and he didn't want to - but that was a lie."
The truth was that Cristiani had always worked independently. And, even if he had been given a top position at Disney, he would always have had someone above him. "My grandfather wasn't going to put up with that," says Hector.
Years later, two fires in Cristiani's studio destroyed everything there, including all his feature films. Since then, a couple of his short films have been rediscovered.
Hector hopes that one day, all his pioneering grandfather's films will reappear. Until then, they live on only in his memory.
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