Italo Bettiol, the creator of ‘Chapi Chapo’, a mythical 1970s animation series, died Wednesday at the age of 96 at his home in Aniane in the south of France, announced one of his relatives. The Italian-born director ‘died peacefully’.
The characters of the series, a blue boy and a pink girl wearing giant hats, their universe populated by magic cubes and the cult credits by François de Roubaix, appeared on the ORTF on October 16, 1974. The 60 five-minute episodes were ‘broadcast all over the world, even in the United States on the Pinwheel show on Nickelodeon’, underlines a press release from the company Magic, representing the rights of ‘Chapi Chapo’.
A specialist in the ‘stop motion’ technique, which ‘consists in animating puppets of foam and felt frame by frame in front of the camera’, Italo Bettiol was originally destined for a career as a painter.
‘Extraordinary machines’
It is in this perspective that the native of Trieste had left Italy for France in 1947 with his sidekick Stefano Lonati, freshly graduated like him from the Fine Arts of Milan.
Finally setting their sights on animation, the duo founded the company Belokapi in 1968, in association with Michel Karlof and Nicole Pichon, which notably produced numerous sequences for the program ‘L’île aux enfants’ (‘Albert et Barnabé’, ‘La Linea’, etc.).
‘Tireless inventor, retired, Italo Bettiol continued to tinker with extraordinary machines in his workshop in Aniane, near Montpellier’, specifies the press release.
/ATS