2003
Animation (colour, sound, 4’30” min)
Italian and English version
Not cannibalism, but love drives cows mad. Just as it happens to human beings.
Lola, a romantic Bolognese cow, finds out that the Michigan’s champion bull, Drake, has died. Then cut up into pieces and burnt, he is one of the ingredients of the artificial milk that feeds their baby. Their romance started via letter and happened via artificial insemination. After the tragic news, Lola goes mad and drowns in her tears. She capitulates to the courtship of Corrado, The NAS (Anti-Adulteration-Squad) carabineer, whose duty is to check on Lola’s health.
A parodic explanation of the BSE disease, Why cows went mad is Marcella Vanzo’s first experiment with digital animation techniques. By using Flash’s potentialities and exploiting in an intelligent manner its technological limits too, Marcella drew this cartoon with quick strokes and sharp colour blots; she wrote a brilliant script for the narrating voice and, as usual, stressed the scenes’ emotional temperature by choosing old Italian and American songs.
So far, Vanzo’s research displays two registers: one more focused on story telling, while the other is more descriptive. On the one hand the artist interprets reality fragments by telling fables, such as this one about the cow Lola and in The Childrens’ Factory, 2002. On the other hand she stages the most common emotions’s ambivalence, the love-hatred relationship between mother and offspring [Mamma, 2001], or between lovers [Lovesong, 2001], attraction and repulsion for sacred matters [Magma, 2003] or power [Clear and Present, 2003].
A distinctive feature of the work is a marked communication wish visible in the precision of her focus on the subject, and in the accuracy of her images. The aim is to convey the message straight to the viewer without filters.
Antonella Crippa