Sinfonia Amazônica: Amazing and Barely Known [full paper]

Abstract

In 1953, a young Brazilian film maker, Anelio Latini Filho, launched what would be the first Brazilian full length animation film: Sinfonia Amazônica, with stories based on Amazon legends. Greatly inspired by the Disney style, and especially by Fantasia, Latini made his film almost on his own. It took him five years and about 500,000 drawings to get it finished. It was a near-incredible feat considering the conditions of Brazilian cinema at that time.

The music of Sinfonia Amazônica is of two kinds: there is a lot of standard classical music in the manner of Fantasia and even a sequence that resembles very much one of those of Walt Disney’s production. But unlike Disney`s films, Latini used already existing records. Opening the film, there is a making of that shows how he worked with those discs and also with music scores to get the images synchronized with the music. Latini hired a small orchestra to play the original music of the film, composed by Latini’s brother, Hélio Latini, in a style that resembles the American animation film music style of the time, complete with some “mickeymousing.” Maybe the most interesting music sequence is that of a jabuti (a kind of turtle) that plays a chorinho on its flute, performed in the soundtrack by Altamiro Carrilho, a leading Brazilian flute player. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the music of Sinfonia Amazônica, its American inspiration and to contextualize its production in the Brazilian scene of that time.