Netflix has announced that director Juan José Campanella, winner of an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2010 for The Secret in Their Eyes, is working on the audiovisual adaptation of the iconic comic strip Mafalda, by the acclaimed Argentinean master of graphic humour, Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, Quino.
Campanella will be the director, scriptwriter and showrunner of the project, developed as an animated series.
Gastón Gorali will work as co-writer and general producer, and Sergio Fernández as production manager. Mafalda is a Netflix original production with Mundoloco CGI.
The project, which is still in the development stage, does not even have an estimated release date, but what is already known, according to what Campanella told the newspaper Clarín, among other things, is that it could be about 10 chapters and that they will not be set in the 1960s. The action will take place in the present day. Even more difficult, because revisions and/or updates of classics always have their risks.
Be that as it may, Mafalda is not one of Quino's things I like the most, I think his best pearls were in his satirical illustrations.
From the first comments on the announcement, there is already the usual unease that something strange or distorted might come out of the adaptation, and Campanella knows that he faces a great challenge.
Adapting something conceived as self-concluding strip-like pills into a series and giving it continuity while maintaining the essence of the original work without using the format of a succession of shorts is not at all easy, I risk saying that it is almost impossible without creating new content as a plot thread.
The difference will only be marked by the distance between the animation and the original work. Even when trying to be as faithful as possible to its essence, the audiovisual language needs other codes that do not go well with the reading of cartoon strips.
The first film, barely 30 minutes long, about Mafalda was broadcast on Argentine television in 1972 and was a succession of 260 short 90-second films that would later be compiled into a feature film released in 1981.
The second adaptation came to Spain in the early 1990s. It was directed by a friend of Quino's, the Cuban director Juan Padrón (1947-2020) and was also a succession of short films.
In 1993 the Spanish company D.G. Producciones SA, in co-production with TVE, produced 104 episodes of Mafalda in 1-minute cartoons directed by Juan Padrón at the ICAIC, which were to form part of an 80-minute film.
In the case of the Campanella series, from your answer to this question by Pablo O.
Scholz in Clarín, it is clear that this time it could be a story rather than a succession of short films.
-And is the story going to be in vignettes, like the strips, or will there be a pivot?
-Of course. Quino's humour is great, but it has the timing of the strip. It's pa-pa-pa, punch line. And in the cinema or in a series, it's a different timing. So, what I thought we still had to find was a story in which that humour could be "said", but as part of the dialogue. And that it happens in a more dynamic way.
Letter from Juan José Campanella about the project.
I was seven or eight years old when the first compendium of Mafalda strips was published in book form. My parents read the strip and told me that I wouldn't understand it. What an offence. What a challenge. I ran to buy it and I still remember coming up the Melo ravine as I read it, laughing and admitting that, indeed, there were strips I didn't understand. Mafalda and her friends not only made me laugh a lot, but also sent me to the dictionary from time to time. And every new word I learned came with the reward of a new laugh.
Soon I was one of Mafalda's gang. I can quote many jokes from memory, but as I am facing this huge challenge today, I won't start with spoilers.
CUT TO Decades later, in the middle of the production of "Metegol". Maestro Quino came to visit our production office. There were almost 200 artists from different generations and for all of us God had entered. I remember that it was on that day that Quino tried, for the first time, to draw with a digital pencil. A giant like him, who had inspired generations of cartoonists with his line, and many more humorists with his sense of irony and sharp commentary, was giving shape to a line, but as never before, without ink or paper.His enthusiasm was that of a child with a new toy, asking dozens of questions. The enthusiasm and curiosity of one who never thought he knew everything. Since that visit we have been asking questions: How can we reconnect the new generations that did not grow up with Mafalda with this great work? How can we bring its wit, its mordacity, to the children who today grow up on digital platforms? How can we, in short, transfer one of the greatest works in the history of Graphic Humour to audiovisual language?
Today, a dozen years after that unforgettable visit, we face this challenge. No more and no less than to turn Mafalda into an animated classic. It is our obligation to preserve Quino's humour, timing, irony and observations. We know that we will not be able to elevate Mafalda, because it cannot be any higher. But we dream that those of us who have been devoted to her from the first hour can share her with our children, and even if there are things reserved only for adults, we can all have a good laugh as a family, and why not, go to the dictionary from time to time.
Without a doubt, and by far the biggest challenge of my life.
Juan José Campanella
July, 2024
