Italo Bettiol was a specialist in stop motion, consisting in “animating foam and felt puppets image by image in front of the camera”. His series “Chapi Chapo”, which appeared on the ORTF in October 1974, was broadcast worldwide.
MO12345LEMONDE with AFP
Italo Bettiol, creator of Chapi Chapo, mythical animation series of the 1970s, died on Wednesday December 28, at the age of 96, at his home in Aniane, in Hérault. The nonagenarian, to whom we also owe Pépin La Bulle, a series broadcast for the first time in the late 1960s, “died peacefully”, according to Eric Valin, a “historic collaborator and friend of the family”, quoted in A press release from Magic, representing the rights of Chapi Chapo.
The characters in the series – a blue boy and a pink girl wearing giant hats -, their universe populated by magic cubes and the credits signed François de Roubaix appeared on ORTF on October 16, 1974. Their stories (sixty Episodes of five minutes) were “broadcast worldwide, to the United States in the program” Pinwheel “on Nickelodeon”, underlines the press release.
Specialist in the Stop Motion technique, which “consists in animating foam and felt puppets image by image in front of the camera”, Italo Bettiol was originally intended for a career as an artist-painter. It is in this perspective that the native of Trieste had left Italy for France in 1947 with his partner Stefano Lonati, both freshly graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Milan.
finally settling his sights on animation cinema, the duo founded in 1968 the Belokapi company, in association with Michel Karlof and Nicole Pichon, who will notably produce numerous sequences of the program “L’Ile aux enfants” ( Albert and Barnabé, La Linea, etc.). “A tireless inventor, retired, Italo Bettiol continued to tinker with extraordinary machines in his workshop in Aniane, near Montpellier”, specifies the press release.