Sometimes this blog will just be Bruno Bozzetto's Dinosaur Bolero.

 

 My family aren't normally the kind to email links, but Dad sent a beauty this week: "a hundred sequences that shaped animation". They tell me "cartoon" was the first word I ever spoke, but there was still a lot here that was new to me, and I recommend a wallow. Nestled squirming two thirds of the way down the list between Caroline Leaf's brilliant The Street and the introduction of Black Vulcan to The All-New Super Friends Hour, is the "Bolero" sequence from Bruno Bozzetto's Allegro Non Troppo ("Not Too Fast") - which was not new to me, just hitherto uncategorised, having turned up uncredited between Peter Pan and Bambi on a pirated VHS that Dad bought in the eighties. I was very glad to see it again: more than just a great spoof of Fantasia's Rites of Spring, it mixes bleak and cute without mercy, it tickles and kicks, the climactic tower blocks bursting from the ground precede Brazil by almost a decade, and I think it may also have taught me a few dance moves. Enjoy.