Jan 12, 2018

Speaking of the producers of "Condorito", today we will open in the US theaters

After release across half of Latin America last October with strong performances that topped the box offices in Chile, Peru, and Colombia, the Peruvian production Condorito: The Movie (Condorito: La Pelicula) opens in limited American release today through Lionsgate and Pantelion Films.

With a production cost of over $8 million, Condorito is a high-budget movie by Latin American standards. The movie is also the latest example of how Latin American studios are becoming increasingly confident at producing and selling quality animation on an international level.

Condorito is the first movie adaptation of one of the most enduring comic strips from South America, with long-lasting success that reaches contemporary readers. The character, created in 1949 by the Chilean cartoonist Pepo (alias of René Ríos Boettiger), was a response to what he felt was an underrepresentation of Chilean national identity in Disney's Saludos Amigos. (The 1942 Disney movie portrayed Chile as a relatively minor character, embodied by the clumsy mail plane Pedro, who carries his mailbags over the Andes.)

However, according to scholar Juan Poblete in the article “Condorito, Chilean Popular Culture and the Work of Mediation,” Disney's influence, and especially the Donald Duck comic strips, were also key to the character's design and the structure of the stories.

After a continent-wide survey to uncover Latin America's most cherished characters, Condorito's franchise potential became obvious for Aronnax Animation Studios, a company founded in Lima by Peruvian film producers Hugo Rose and Abraham Vurnbrand in 2009. It is the company's third feature-length cg animation production, after The Illusionauts (2012) and The Nutcracker Sweet (2015).

Carton Brew spoke to Aronnax Animation Studios' Hugo Rose, who produced Condorito, and Alex Orrelle and Eduardo Schuldt, the two co-directors, via phone and email to discuss details of the production and what it means for animation from the Andean region.

Cartoon Brew: Why did you decide to adapt Condorito's comic strip and what other Latin American characters have you also considered-

Hugo Rose, producer: Before deciding on the character, we conducted a survey across South America to discover the most marketable Latin American intellectual properties. The survey revealed many popular characters that worked well at a regional level, but only Condorito drew universal recognition throughout the continent, along with Mexican tv show El Chavo del Ocho and Argentine comic strip character Mafalda.

However, where Condorito clearly stood out as the survey's most popular character was in his capacity, paradoxically, to provide local appeal across the entire continent. The character is so well embedded that most of our respondents, regardless of where they were from, thought that Condorito's country of origin matched their own.

What were the biggest challenges in adapting the Condorito comic strip into animation-

Alex Orrelle, co-director: Mainly in two areas: