"ALMA, what good news! There is a need of soul, in this arid and frenetic time. There is a need of poetic, free, courageous animation. An art capable of opening the mind, of feeding the dimension of the dream, but also to strengthen the broken ties, the memory, the relationship with the earth and nature ... All things that the "Marche school" has always done. Because then, in addition to the dream, there is also the concreteness of the craft, the technique, the "bottega", and the history of the Urbino School shows how important it is to have teachers and travel companions to deal with, to find your own way (style, spirit). This beautiful initiative, so concrete, linked to a place, and at the same time so utopian, founded on an idea. I am with you! "

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Fabrizio Tassi

 

 

 

 

"It is with great honor that I accept your invitation to become a friend of ALMA association and I am pleased to share this status with filmmakers I admire greatly. Mainly, I support the Art school of Urbino and recognize the importance and vitality of the Italian animation."

 

Jacques Drouin

 

 

 

 

"Thanks for this excellent new. The honor will be for me if you accept a new friend in these difficult times."

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Jean-François Laguionie

 

 

 

 

"Thank you for the honor of being a friend of the new Association of Animated Film Artists ALMA. I am sure that this association of talented like-minded people will become an influential body of artistic animation and illustration in Italy, a generator of new ideas and initiatives aimed at providing decent working conditions for artists, as well as spreading the influence of this art on a wide audience. The creative potential of artists - graduates and teachers of Scuola del Libro di Urbino will be a guarantee. Good luck to all of us in a good deed."

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Aleksandr Petrov

 

 

 

 

"I’m pleased by your determination to make something good and positive from the present situation. It will end, most of us will survive, and then I hope the world might rethink some of its selfish ways, so that we can all lead rather better lives afterwards. I would be very happy to be called a Friend of ALMA."

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Peter Lord

 

 

 

 

"I am happy to be friend of your association! What a fantastic team! I hope one day in postcorona we can meet and have together some nice drinks."

Priit Parn

 

 

 

 

"I accept your invitation to the team of friends of your association with great pleasure. It is also my appreciation of the artistic activity of ex-students and teachers of the Art School of Urbino. This is a valuable initiative, especially in the current situation. I await further information regarding cooperation."

 

Jerzy Kucia

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"Dear Simone and partners, of course I want to be a friend of  ALMA association! A nice and noble idea. Italy is the land of the arts, and will continue to astonish the world. It’s from my apartment, where I work, like many others, that I wish all the warmest best to all of you. There will come a day when  we’ll exchange our films - plants, flowers, that we cultivated during the time of cholera…"

 

Michel Ocelot

 

 

 

 

"I accept your invitation to the group of animation friends. To be close, inspiring and exchanging energy and experiences each other is good and necessery. Doing animation is very special way of spending life. People who are animation artists are like family of specific individualitys, talking and understanding life through the poetry and imagination, close to the children's way."

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Piotr Dumala

 

 

 

 

"I was delighted to hear about the creation of ALMA, which brings together talents in animation and graphic cinema that translate the highest level of artistic and ethical approach in the practice of their craft. I believe this is excellent news for the region of La Marche as the craddle of this precious and innovative practice, but also for Italian cinema and for all of us film viewers and film lovers from all over the world."

 

Jean Michel Frodon

 

 

 

 

"I’m delighted to be friends with your ALMA association. I love Italy, my favorite country in the world, and I love Italian animation which is one of my favorites among all the Animated cinematography worldwide. The type of movement in continuous animated transformations that Italian animators develop is a unique language, it's like the poetic and visual translation of a line of thought when we are alone thinking about our intimate things. The origin of this unique expression, language and poetry of the movement is well located and identified: the School of Art of Urbino."

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Regina Pessoa

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"Beginning with the name - beautiful!- the Scuola del Libro of  Urbino let us notice how “different” it is. Not less demanding or compliant. Quite the opposite. Just thinking about how many relevant artists have been schooled on those desks and between those walls is enough: how many other institutes designated to educate new generations can show up a curriculum like this? Now a group of these artists, alongside their lecturers, reunites in an association of volunteers with the ambition to support and enhance the practice of  animation and illustration. Friends, friends, I’m with you!"

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Alberto Barbera

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"I am with you and I think that your ALMA association is a very good idea to defend the Art School of Urbino, a source of talent, as well as the art of animation, the interests of animators and illustrators."

Georges Schwizgebel

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"Is the Scuola del Libro of Urbino as the National Board of Canada, or the Zagreb Film? Or, to go further, is it as the Athen of Pericle or the Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent? If we transform what needs to be transformed, and we dare to compare what is great with what is greater, obviously yes.

This is about a group of artists who follow and develop a communal pathway of thinking, or the same practical method oriented to the same premises, therefore all production results are consistent.

Inside an Institute not institutionally designed for traditional animation, but which lives in Raffaello Sanzio’s hometown, fate wanted that  a generation of pencil and paintbrush artists (born during the 1960s and 1970s) have had sensations, culture, imagination in common and created an extremely unique contribution to the history of italian animation: that Neo-pictorial Current which that historical period made flourish, and enrich, on site and outside the Marches as well. The School (del Libro) and the (neo-pictorial) School never had sponsors, thinkers or Manifestos. Everything has been teached, learned, created, designed, awarded by the world’s festivals by their artists and their partners. Meanwhile, the political and economic power kept turning their backs. Anyway, hasn’t it always been like this?"

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Giannalberto Bendazzi

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"The Scuola del Libro of Urbino is that place a little introverted, modest and extraordinary, from where marvellous generations of  animation artists have been raised for decades."

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Luca Raffaelli

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"Gian Luigi Toccafondo and Simone Massi are exponents of that traditional “marchigian” animation, which has been forged from the Scuola del Libro Art Institute of Urbino."

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Emiliano Morreale

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"What is a school after all? It’s not desks, classrooms, lectures and free periods. A real school has a certain idea of seeing the reality within, of thinking about the world and creating a new image.

This is what connected and connects Urbino’s people, who have found a unique and peculiar way of  expression and share their lives between the many different techniques of animation.

Therefore, we are not only interested in precisely define a stylistic trait or their affinities, rather enlighten instead - necessarily in a raphsodic and explorative way - a body of work and personalities between the most significant and vital of the last 20 years of european animation cinema."

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Federico Rossin

 

FROM: Il mouse e la matita. L'animazione italiana contemporanea

Edited by Bruno Di Marino e Giovanni Spagnoletti

Saggi Marsilio Editore

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"The idea is to return 15 years of italian animation at 360° degrees, trying to have a panoramic view that puts together the more experimental works with the more distinctly narrative ones, the feature film and the short film, the music videos and the opening titles, the theme songs, the commercials, and those audiovisual works that once were considered minor but that are considered indispensable for the research today.

Not only the retrospective corresponds with 50 years of the Pesaro Film Festival, but also with 60 years of the animation course at Scuola del Libro of Urbino, a department from where hundreds of artists graduated. Therefore, only the Pesaro Film Festival could have celebrated an institution that represents an international excellence, dedicating a broad space to what it may be defined as the “school of the Marches”, formed by artists from this county or that have been professionally educated there."

 

Bruno Di Marino

 

FROM: Il mouse e la matita. L'animazione italiana contemporanea

Edited by Bruno Di Marino e Giovanni Spagnoletti

Saggi Marsilio Editore

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"I have been more or less prepared to the surprise from the Scuola del Libro of Urbino, when I had been contacted by the illustrators and filmmakers who attended there, trying to conquer them for the magazine works, asking them for drawings and covers for magazines such as Linea d’Ombra and Lo Straniero, from Gian Luigi Toccafondo, to Simone Massi and the youngest. In their works I found an atmosphere, a tradition, the sign of  ancient roots:  a sweet and anxious lyricism all together, sometimes dreamy, a peaceful or worried malinconia. I found Leopardi again and, closer, those poets that once I used to discover and publish in my magazines."

 

Goffredo Fofi
 

FROM: Illustrazione. Gli illustratori della Scuola del Libro

Edited by Edizioni Scuola del Libro

 2012

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"Like in an ancient renaissance atelier, the Scuola del Libro of Urbino is a small reality with a big soul. Immersed at the centre of  Italy’s heart, in a geographical area deeply connected with the art world, this institute still funds on an intimate and intimist handcrafted idea of the creative process. The mutual contaminations between who teaches and who learns, the collective artistic and cultural imaginary and a way of making art that has the old expertise taste, that creates invisible connections and a strong sense of affinity onto which remain attached, even after having grown up.

The  touch of  who studied in Urbino is unique: genuine, sincere, profound. As for their stories delicacy, as for their different peculiar styles, the artists from Urbino are nowadays recognised, awarded and loved from the animated cinematography of all the world."

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Priscilla Mancini