The animation legend was awarded the Best Movie ICON Award, crowning his more than sixty-year career in Italian cinema
Best Movie
By Irene Rosignoli
6/7/2025
From the sixties to today it has more than 300 films,
including short and feature films, for which it has obtained 130 awards,
including an Oscar nomination. An unmistakable name that of Bruno Bozzetto, the
legend of Italian animated cinema, one of the most eclectic and influential
cartoonists of yesterday and today. Guest at Best Movie Comics & Games
2025, the incomparable author now eighty-seven years old received the Best
Movie ICON Award and went back to 60 years ago, when his visionary genius gave
life to one of the greatest (and forerunner) masterpieces of Italian cinema:
West and Soda.
"We were really reckless," he said, thinking back to those years. "First of all, there were very few of us, and this is an incredible fact: if you go to see a Pixar film today, there are at least twenty minutes of credits to list all the staff. We worked for more than three years, from the first sketches to the finished product. The big advantage we had was that we were free: if we liked something, we did it, otherwise we deleted it. That's one of the great tricks of this film and the reason why it's still so fresh today: there's a lot of improvisation."
Curious – and one could say prophetic – is the choice of the western genre, which anticipates by a few years the birth of the spaghetti western subgenre then inaugurated with Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dollars. Originally, however, Bruno Bozzetto had other plans: "I wanted to make a horror film. In particular, I had in mind to adapt Frankenstein, because it is a story that everyone knows. Just as Disney used Snow White and Pinocchio, I also wanted a fairy tale." In the end, however, a totally different genre was chosen: "I started by watching the western films I had seen as a kid and I realized that they were absolutely elementary. After a minute, you already know who dies, who goes to jail, etc”. I said: "I want to make a film like this, simple, in which everyone already knows what to expect". We started from things that already existed and then we embroidered on them”.
Between funny anecdotes and bizarre curiosities, what emerges is the figure of an author dedicated purely to his art: “I was never interested in box office receipts. I still don't know how much my films grossed. West and Soda was not a success, but we weren't interested, for us it was a game to do something new. The beauty lies precisely in the passion and freedom with which we did it, we had fun without conditioning. Today I realize that in large productions it is no longer like that”.
The new that advances, however, does not scare him: in addition to being very curious about new technologies and artificial intelligence, Bruno Bozzetto closely follows young Italian talents, first and foremost Zerocalcare. Among the directors and actors, however, he especially mentions Pupi Avati, Paolo Genovese and Valerio Mastandrea. With a clarification: "Obviously, the number one for me is always Fellini. But unfortunately, he is no longer with us."
In closing, there is also good news for fans of his cinema: new short films by Mr. Rossi, his historical character, a symbol of the average Italian citizen struggling with the malpractice of society, are on the way. "I will make a new series of films with Mr. Rossi – Bozzetto anticipated -. I started with him and I told Rai that I thought it would be nice to end my career like this, since I am now of a certain age. Of course, in Rai they did not keep in mind that a series can also be 300 films..."
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