User:Anm8tor

My name is Angelo Libutti. I hope to contribute to the definition and understanding of story telling through film by contributing research and exchanging dialog to the many facets of how and why we, as human beings, tell stories. The following article is the best way I know of to introduce myself to the Wikipedia Community.

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“IL QUOTIDIANO” newspaper

A Cartoon World

As a little boy, he was constantly drawing and giving his “ mini-masterpieces” to his neighbors as gifts. With a clever eye and constant curiosity, his observation of the world was filtered through his interest for everything surrounding him. That universe was immediately put on paper. His passion for drawing, which started precisely on the shores of the Reggio Calabria Strait, brought him all the way to Hollywood.

Angelo Libutti, 35 years old, born in Puglia, a resident of Reggio for eight years, moved to Rome from Calabria and made his jump overseas more then ten years ago, to Canada and then California, following the dream of animation, to succeed and become one of the creators of those animated movies that for decades charmed and captivated the audiences all over the world. A dream that has become reality, like in one of the fairy tales told in one of his animated movies. A dream that he followed tenaciously and that, one more time, shows the reality of a young man, with a talent for training and development, structured and determined his choice to leave his home town.

In Italy, Libutti had his first important satisfactions, which eventually brought him to see up-close the famous Oscar statuette, to be requested from companies whose names cause goose bumps, from Disney to Spielberg’s DreamWorks, and to work on fantastic films, among which, to mention his last one, “Alvin”.

But previously he worked as an animator as well, for “The Triplets of Belleville” (which has been nominated for two Oscars), and as art director and color key storyboard artist for “Surly Squirrel”; “The Three Wise Men” that won the Spanish Oscar; again as art director and storyboard development for “Eden’s Wake” nominated at the San José Film Festival; he developed storyboards for “Ice Princess”, “Tarzan 2”, and “The Nutty Professor” – all famous Disney films. In addition, he also lent his efforts to commercials like “Puma”, where he managed the storyboards and most of the animation.

Let’s start at the beginning. Angelo was born in San Giovanni Rotondo, padre Pio, a town on the shores of Reggio where he was raised by his family, his father, manager of a well-known insurance company. It was the 70’s and, together with his brothers and sister, he spent his first eight years there. Eight years that left Angelo with the most kind and beautiful memories. Then the Libutti family relocated to Rome where Angelo continued to cultivate his passion for drawing in the Capitol.

“I always wished, since I was 8 years old, to make animation films and I dreamt of being a mechanism in this grand clock that marks time and lives in each of us,” He told us. “I had always been the best student in the drawing class in school, from elementary to university. Suddenly the need to reciprocate with my gift for what Disney and all the other movie directors, like Fellini, have done for the public grew in me. They gave to all of us when we go to watch a movie. One smile, a tear, a lesson, or the possibility to enrich our souls.”

But in Italy there was no University for Animation. So he started purchasing any book related to this art form, trying to discover as much information as possible about it.

“However, most of the books were not written in Italian. So I started saving money to pay an interpreter to translate them. Having been born in a family where on my father’s side were all lawyers and judges and on my mother’s side almost all doctors, I had to work hard a “tiny bit” to prove to them that “drawing puppet characters” could be a way to make a living and try to figure out the best way to realize myself in this industry.”

Then came the turnaround, that test of self, as in a fairy tale.

“When I was 16 years old, a friend of mine discovered an article that mentioned that Disney in Milan was looking for new talent and had invited anybody to submit some drawings. From that moment I started to draw Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck every day, literally from morning until night. I sent in my artwork and just few weeks later I received a letter from them asking me if I was interested in visiting their studio, which I framed and have kept hanging in my parents’ house. That day that I read that letter, and the day when I entered the Disney studio, will be forever sealed in my heart. The director, a really charming gentleman, showed me the studio and alleys where there were framed pictures of himself with Walt Disney. He brought me to a room where all the comic artists were drawing and introduced me: This is Angelo, he will be the youngest comic-strip artist working for us.

“Words that recharged me and motivated me then and still today, pushing me more and more to improve this God-given gift.”

Angelo never had any formal training, but Piergiorgio Ruggeri, the assistant director, noticed that the young boy had great artistic skills and he asked him to do some tests instead of attending Disney Academy.

“In the meantime, I started working as an illustrator for some magazines, starting from the local up to the national and to the European ones, such as Corriere della Sera, Avvenimanti, and Galatea. “My main objective remained to go to the USA and graduate from the university that Walt Disney had built, CalArts.”

A wish that was still growing in him even during the mandatory year of military service that he had to serve. After he received the bad news that the director of Walt Disney in Milan had passed away, he decided, with the encouragement of his colleagues and the illustrator and mentor Marco Gramigna, to follow.

“Marco wrote me one of the most beautiful recommendation letters that I ever received. Therefore, with the final consent of my parents, I left for the USA, first of all to learn the  language and to be able to do the TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) in English that any foreigner not born in the UK or in the USA had to pass to attend any university. The timeframe was really short… I was supposed to pass the exam in six months, otherwise I would have to wait until the following year to apply at CalArt. At the University of Riverside, in California, they told me that with my basic level of English, which was almost zero, I would have needed from nine to twelve months to attempt to pass the test, and that no one had ever been successful in less than that timeframe.”

His passion and determination, though, were too strong to let those words discourage him.

“Studying night and day, from 7am until 4 of the following day, seven days per week, I was able to pass the exam. I was in seventh heaven and with the TOEFL diploma I went at CalArt University, where in the meantime they accepted me. I remember that the director called me Michelangelo after he had seen my drawings.”

But despite his efforts, his entry would have to be for the following year, due to an accidental miscalculation of dates.

“Notwithstanding the persistent request from the director, I decided not to wait. Instead, I went to the next best University, where I would have still been in time to register myself for the same year and where they accepted me as the top admission portfolio and artistic test. The Italian Government,” he told us, “wasn’t’ helping artists economically or facilitating their goals in any way. Therefore I studied in Canada at Sheridan College, a school that today is considered the Harvard of the movie industry and animation. After the degree, the Wall Street Journal wrote an article about the Sheridan and me: of 1746 applicants – from all over the world that apply every year – just 100 were accepted to the course and I was the only one that was hired from DreamWorks, and it had been more than five years since the last one had been hired.”

But again, after good news some incredibly bad will follow.

“I lost that opportunity since the number of visas to work in the USA, for people that come from Italy, is very limited. I remained in Canada and, seven years later I gained citizenship.”

In the meantime, Canada offered him the opportunity of working on well-known movies and after receiving citizenship he was hired by the California company Rhythm & Hues, that recently had won an Oscar for the movie “The Golden Compass” and had finished “Alvin”, a box-office hit around the world.

“Alvin is based on some music discs for the young and the elderly. In 1983 NBC produced an animated TV show with an audience of 10 million viewers.”

And soon another movie would come out, “Everyone’s Hero”, for which Libutti worked as storyboard artist as well as 3D Layout, a cameraman but with a computer, locating, with the help of the computer and the pseudo 3D movie camera to find the correct and best framing and composition for each sequence.

“This movie,” he explained, “was an idea of the actor Christopher Reeve” – the famous Superman that passed away a few years ago. “A story that he came up with for putting his kids to sleep. Reeve died in the making of the movie and was replaced by the artistic director of the movie “Lion King” and the animation director Colin Brady ( “E.T.”, “ Hulk”, “Lemony Snicket- a series of unfortunate events” and “Magnolia”).

“Colin is a dear friend, our bond was born from a mutual respect since he loved my storyboard drawing and me his approach in the making a movie. He used to tell me: ‘Angelo, I can recognize immediately which boards are yours from the expression and the line quality that seem like they’re coming out of the screen.’”

Today Libutti works on big movie productions, doing what he always dreamt of a long time ago in the gulf of Calabria.

“It definitely is a fantastic feeling to know that you are working with the best in the field of movie making. In every movie work mainly a maximum of four storyboard artists and knowing that you are one of them means that that you are one of the four best in the world… It’s a great sensation!”

And it comes from someone who, besides being appreciated for the outlook of his drawings, is esteemed for the speed with which he executes his panels giving life to his characters. These companies, he added, “are always looking for new and unique ideas. Everybody does his work and is respected for his role. Often the director is more humble then everyone else, since he remembers what it cost him to get there and how it was for him at the beginning. It is not an easy job, since you need to realize from the visual point of view and cooperate with the writers of the screenplay and with the director. Sometimes the hours are insane, seven days per week, for more than fifteen hours of work each day, sometimes twenty-four hours on twenty-four hours, but for me it is a dream come true, a dream of a baby of eight years old born on the other side of the world.”

Everything is less difficult when you genuinely love something. This is the lesson of the Italian artist in Hollywood.

“I am not hiding that there were some really tough times, when you feel alone, when your language and culture of where you are from are becoming more of a problem than an advantage. You find yourself living in the shadow of the stereotypical Italian mafia man, or the pizza man, or the playboy that doesn’t want to work. I had to prove that I can be the total opposite and anyone who knows me knows that there are different types of Italians out there. There was a time I had to work twice as hard as everyone else, always have a smile on my face, always trying to be positive and helping whoever at that moment needed help. The first years are the hardest ones to face. The tricky part is when you are trying to establish and get settled because the banks aren’t taking into consideration your credit history that you might have in Italy, and because of that it is quite difficult to find an apartment or lease a car. Only when you can be recognized from a magazine or you win an Oscar can you be granted an “Honors Degree” university recognition, this is when its starts to get easy.”

It’s natural to ask how much his “Italian” blood influenced the way he draws, and how much he had to assimilate to the American drawing style during those years.

“I grew up in Calabria and Rome and I used to draw and copy Michelangelo’s sculptures, and paintings by Caravaggio. Subconsciously my left-side artist brain absorbed information that I didn’t realize I knew. I discovered I had it in me just when I started to draw life drawing or animals from real life. Everybody used to call me Michelangelo here in America. Having been born in Italy definitely made my line quality much stronger than the Americans who grew up in the New World. But saying that I know that by being here all these years I gained some artistic skills that I wouldn’t have been able to grasp if I had stayed in Italy. Perhaps I’ve become less theatrical and am basing my skills more on everyday life. To become an artist that everyone respects and admires when you are still alive is a great achievement. The kind of art that we produce, is not made to spoil our ego, but contrarily we are doing it for please the audience that goes to the movie theater.

In any case, the Italian artist taught the American ones since, in the last 2 companies he worked with, Starz and Rhythm & Hues, he was chosen from all crew to teach drawing inside the company.

“At Rhythm & Hues there were more than 600 qualified personnel, I taught drawing and storyboard” he added, “even for the same University that he graduated in the year 2000 and for another one in Canada as well.”

Angelo Libutti’s dreams continue. When we asked him what more he wishes, he answered:

“To become a director as famous as Fellini, Francis Ford Coppola, Scorsese, Brad Bird, Ridley Scott, Alfred Hitchcock. All these directors have done storyboards for their films and most of them still do.”

Knowing how to produce work with the computer is certainly a quality that will allow Angelo to keep up and grow with time and be well known as the best storyboard artist in movie making, a strong incentive for his career.

One more card up his sleeve is that he took a class in Maisner acting.

“It is fundamental,“ he explained, “for my point of view to be able to be communicated professionally to the actors and to whoever is behind the camera, where the majority of the movie is being made. It will be hard, since here I don’t have any contacts or hooks in the field since I was not born here… but life is difficult no matter what, I hope to make it by continuing to work with passion and never giving up.”

In his American life there is still space for his memories of Calabria.

“Fantastic memories, for sure the most beautiful of my childhood. My mother took us to the beach to play in the sand and in the clear crystalline water. I still remember the flavors of the cakes, the best I ever tested, the concept of friendship like brotherhood; my father’s colleagues, when they came to visit our home, which they used to call “Libutti’s Restaurant”, at night just to taste my mother’s dishes. And then the memories of the elementary school, a school that back then seemed to my eyes enormous and when I went last time for a visit I was stunned by how tiny it was.”

By Paola Abenavoli

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I hope that the article communicates my passion for art and storytelling.