In his youth, when Fellini had not yet dreamed of becoming a director, he drew caricatures and planned to take up painting seriously. But even after becoming a recognized master of cinema, he continued to draw inspiration for new films from drawing.
“At the beginning of each film, I spend most of my time at my desk and do nothing but absent-mindedly draw women’s butts and breasts. This is my method of entering the film, of beginning to decipher it through these arabesques,” Fellini wrote in his biography.
Almost every woman he draws is hyper-erotic. Those who knew Fellini closely said that the director loved curvy girls. Once he even said that he dreamed of falling asleep on the lap of his nanny, who had noticeable “roundness.” Thus, the maestro once again proved that a true Italian follows the principle “there should be a lot of beauty.”
Less often, he depicted men, whose figures are usually several times smaller than women’s and look weak and skinny next to curvy girls. He also painted guys with impressive muscles in poses of ancient Roman gods.
The main difference between each guy he depicts is his exaggerated manhood, drawn in detail. In some cartoons the penis is depicted as a snake, in others – as a punching bag, and somewhere else – as a dough swing.
In a word, Federico’s creations resemble the scribbles of a teenager experiencing a period of heightened sexuality. But at the same time, they very ironically depict the life of Italy in the mid-twentieth century.
The director drew these caricatures anywhere: on storyboards for a new film, in books he read, on restaurant napkins (which he forgot on the table), on scraps of other people’s phones (so now the digits of the number are visible through someone’s genitals) .
Most often, Fellini used multi-colored pencils, less often watercolors or felt-tip pens. He often accompanied the images with short captions that were filled with grammatical mistakes.
Sometimes Fellini drew a caricature of someone from the company simply during a feast. However, the peculiarity of the maestro’s humor was that these drawings did not offend those who recognized themselves in them, but, on the contrary, made them laugh along with the others.
The director himself was quite dismissive of his hobby, calling the drawings scribbles or daubs. However, after his death, his friends began to systematize the director’s cartoons and published a huge album. After that, their popularity increased so much that they traveled almost all over the world.
His friend Tonino Guerra, with whom Federico wrote scripts for such masterpieces as “Amarcord” (1973), “And the Ship Sails On” (1983), etc., created the animation “The Long Journey”, in which he “revitalized” the drawings of himself director.
As Italian film critic Vincenzo Monica noted: “Fellini’s drawings, created at the intersection of cinema, painting and comics, contain the signs of the poetry of the great mystic dreamer, and still remain food for all the “living souls” floating on our planet.”