The creator of the Chapi Chapo children’s program, the Italian Italo Bettiol, has just died at the age of 96.
Italo Bettiol, the creator of Chapi Chapoa legendary animation series from the 1970s, died on Wednesday at the age of 96 at his home in Aniane in the Hérault, announced one of the relatives of the director of Italian origin.
The nonagenarian, to whom we also owe Pepin the Bubblebroadcast for the first time in the late 1960s, “died peacefully”, according to Eric Valin, “historic collaborator and friend of the family”, quoted in a press release from the company Magic, representing the rights of Chapi Chapo.
Cult credits
The characters of the series – a blue boy and a pink girl wearing giant hats -, their universe populated by magic cubes and the cult credits by François de Roubaix, appeared on the ORTF on October 16, 1974.
Their stories (60 five-minute episodes) were “broadcast all over the world, as far away as the United States on Nickelodeon’s Pinwheel,” the statement said.
A specialist in the “stop motion” technique, which “consists in animating foam and felt puppets frame by frame in front of the camera”, Italo Bettiol was originally destined for a career as an artist-painter.
It is in this perspective that the native of Trieste had left Italy for France in 1947 with his sidekick Stefano Lonati, freshly graduated like him from the Fine Arts of Milan.
tireless inventor
Finally setting their sights on animation, the duo founded the company Belokapi in 1968, in association with Michel Karlof and Nicole Pichon, which notably produced many sequences of the show children’s island (Albert and Barnabas, The Lineaetc.).
“Tireless inventor, retired, Italo Bettiol continued to tinker with extraordinary machines in his workshop in Aniane, near Montpellier”, specifies the press release.
