Mafalda will have a series on Netflix, with an Oscar-winning director.

BarcelonaReforming the world was very complicated in the 1960s, and it still is more than half a century later. But Mafalda is ready to try again. Netflix has announced that it is developing an animated series with the famous character created by Quino, who starred in hundreds and hundreds of comics between 1964 and 1973. The film captured the concerns of the Argentine middle class and, above all, portrayed the situation of the progressive youth that emerged in that decade of great change and social transformation.

Director Juan José Campanella will be in charge of directing and producing this project, whose release date has not yet been determined. For now, the platform has released a trailer showing planet Earth while majestic music plays.Thus Spoke Zarathustraby Richard Strauss, immortalized in cinema by Stanley Kubrick in the film 2001, Space OdysseyHowever, instead of a monolith, what appears behind the globe is Mafalda’s hair, a sure prelude to awkward questions and wry musings. Moreover, the finger alters the Earth’s rotation and reverses its usual latitude, so that the south—and therefore Argentina—is the most visible country.

This wouldn’t be the first time the character has been animated, but it is the most ambitious attempt. Mafalda previously appeared in fifty short films, ranging from one to four minutes long, shot in the early 1970s, directed by Jorge Martin, known as Cato. The series was later adapted into a feature film, released in theaters in 1982.

In the 1990s, there was another adaptation, in this case by the Cuban Juan Padrón, a close friend of the cartoonist, with whom he had already worked on several projects. In this case, 104 short films were produced, partly shot with Spanish production. A shortened version was also made in film form. To this must be added a color film, directed by Carlos Márquez, released at the end of 1981, and a curious participation as a commentator, in 2017, in the evening newscast of Telefe, responding to current issues in the form of strips.

The fact that Campanella is now the main character in the new version, in addition to the show being provided by a global platform like Netflix, indicates that he will be an ambitious producer. After all, this is an Oscar-winning director who won the Best Foreign Language Film award. The secret is in their eyes In 2019, and in 2012 he was already nominated in the same category. The bride’s sonThe director considered this to be the “biggest challenge” of his life.

It is our duty to keep the humor timing“The paradox and Quino’s observations,” Campanella explained in a statement. “We know that we will not be able to raise Mafalda’s level, because it cannot be higher. But we dream that those of us who have always dedicated ourselves to him can share it with our children, and even if there are things reserved for adults only, we can all laugh as a family, and why not turn to the dictionary of many in the meantime.”

Mafalda is the best-known character of Joaquín Salvador Lavado Tejón, who was born in the city of Mendoza in 1932. From an early age he was called Quino, to distinguish him from his uncle who was also called Joaquín. He died on September 30, 2020, at the age of 88, after a very fruitful career as a comic strip and acerbic commentator on current affairs, embodied in twenty books, not counting the Mafalda works.