Presenting the restored version of Lucky and Zorba at the children's festival, the Italian animation master warned that his country’s chronic lack of policy is causing its studios to lag behind

A moment during the talk

On 19 July, Enzo D’Alò used the presentation of the restored version of his Lucky and Zorba at the Giffoni Film Festival to mount a forthright defence of animation as an art form – and to criticise US studio filmmaking, artificial intelligence (AI) and Italy’s enduring failure to support the sector structurally.

The 72-year-old director, one of the defining figures of Italian animation, introduced the newly restored edition of his 1998 hit in the Elements +3 section at Giffoni’s Multimedia Valley. The film, adapted from Chilean writer Luis Sepúlveda’s eponymous novel, follows the cat Zorba, who promises a dying seagull that he will care for her egg and teach the hatchling to fly. It will be available on Mediaset Infinity from 20 July.

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Nearly three decades after its theatrical release, Lucky and Zorba has remained a fixture for successive generations of viewers, rather than a nostalgic artefact, D’Alò argued. “This film has been watched and requested continuously over the years; it has never disappeared into oblivion,” he said, recalling invitations he has had to present and discuss it internationally, including in China.

The restoration, carried out by Rome’s Cine Lab Services, has allowed the filmmaker and his collaborators to revisit the image, sound and format with contemporary digital tools. The original soundtrack, mixed in Dolby Surround, has been upgraded to 5.1, while the image has been reworked to recover its colour and luminosity, and has been adapted slightly for contemporary screen formats.

But the helmer stressed that no thematic updating was needed. The pic’s concerns – solidarity, friendship, respect for difference and the environment, pollution, and responsibility towards others – are, he said, “unfortunately still current”. Its ecological and humanist core has only acquired greater urgency since 1998.

D’Alò’s remarks quickly widened into a broader reflection on what children’s animation ought to be. He rejected the idea that modern filmmaking must flatten stories or underestimate younger audiences, pointing out that Pixar itself has often taken risks with layered and demanding narratives. Viewers become emotionally involved, he suggested, not through distraction or sensory overload, but by sharing characters’ experiences and feelings.

Although he did not single out a specific title, the filmmaker made clear his dissatisfaction with part of the US animation model, which he described as an adversary to the kind of cinema he believes in: work that is poetic, visually accomplished and emotionally participatory without reducing audiences to passive consumers.

For D’Alò, this question is inseparable from the role of culture in a time marked by violence, polarisation and diminishing respect for others. Children, he argued, should not merely be instructed in rules, but also be given stories that help them understand coexistence, empathy and peaceful civic life. The imagination of a child – including the capacity to pursue an apparently impossible dream – remains a crucial space of freedom and self-discovery.

The prospect of AI was met with similar scepticism. While acknowledging the technology’s potential as a production tool, D’Alò warned against shortcuts designed to compress work that traditionally takes years. An animated feature is not a product that can be treated like a pop song, he said; it requires time, craft and a collective artistic process.

The central issue, in his view, is that animation is not simply a sequence of images. Its very name contains the word “anima”, or “soul” – something that cannot be generated by a machine. The hand-drawn imperfections, emotional sensibility and individual artistic contribution of animators, designers and background artists are what make an animated film alive, rather than merely efficient.

His sharpest criticism, however, was reserved for Italy’s animation policy. D’Alò contrasted the country’s position with that of France, which has built a long-term, dedicated support system for the sector. Italy’s governments, he argued, have repeatedly recognised animation as an area of national expertise without translating that achievement into coherent funding or sustained industrial measures.

The result is visible across European markets and festivals, where Italian projects struggle to achieve the presence enjoyed by their French counterparts. In particular, he mentioned the absence of Italian projects at the upcoming edition of Cartoon Forum, Europe's largest event entirely dedicated to animated series and set to unspool in Toulouse in September. For D’Alò, the problem is not a lack of talent or stories, but the absence of a strategy that understands animation as a cultural industry requiring continuity, specialised investment and patience.

If Lucky and Zorba demonstrates anything, it is that such patience can pay off. Built around Sepúlveda’s fable of a promise across species, the film has endured because it treats its young audience seriously, combining an accessible adventure with reflections on care, diversity and environmental destruction. The restored version thus returns not simply as a polished classic, but as a reminder of what Italian animation can achieve when it gives artists the space they need to make films with heart, rather than merely manufacture content.