Naples is always at the heart of the animated films put forward by Alessandro Rak and the team at Mad Entertainment studios, founded by Luciano Stella; a universal rendering of Naples, exuding poetry and freedom. The third animated feature created by the Italian studio, (after The Art of Happiness [+lee también:
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Yaya e Lennie – The Walking Liberty is an ecological fairy tale for kids and grownups, set in a post-apocalyptic future where the Neapolitan suburbs have been reclaimed by tropical forests and civilisation has retreated. Yaya and Lennie are two friends, she a teen with dark skin and a free spirit, he a simple-minded giant, explicitly referencing Lennie Small in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. They lead a hand-to-mouth existence in the forest, trying to avoid the violence meted out by soldiers belonging to the Institution, a form of authoritarian and Orwellian centralised government which is always on the lookout for children to take away to the city and educate according to the rules of progress and civilisation. The forest is also home to primitive indigenous tribes, persecuted by the Institution, who live in total harmony with nature and who represent a pure state of freedom, reminiscent of the Na’vi creatures in Avatar. In fact, visually speaking, it’s that same lush shade of green which dominates the film - made in 3D-CGI using Blender to integrate the CGI effects into the movie’s backdrops – as it endlessly and noisily traverses the vegetation from the sudden subjective viewpoint of a bird or a low-flying insect. A great deal of care has gone into the sound, incorporating original music by Dario Sansone, Enzo Foniciello and Rak himself.

Forced to flee, Yaya and Lennie head south, towards a utopian Land of Music, and on their journey they cross paths with a group of “rebels” armed only with musical instruments and two kilos of TNT, with which they hope to incite a revolution once they’ve made it into the Institution’s beating heart. They’re headed up by Rospoleon, their comical South American elected leader who speaks of justice and democracy as a force against the current technological dictatorship. To really drive the film’s message home, Rak includes in his movie Charlie Chaplin’s speech on freedom from the end of The Great Dictator, which is screened amidst ruins in the middle of the jungle by a family whose son has been indoctrinated by the Institution. Yaya is attracted to this boy, but this doesn’t shake her inner convictions.

Yaya e Lennie is an animation with international potential, capable of crossing borders on account of its themes – friendship, civil coexistence, the salvific power of nature, the idea of a journey – and its artistic high quality, which is the result of a team effort which has managed to preserve the particular image mix specific to MAD Entertainment products, using more advanced techniques than in previous films. Its winning feature is its Neapolitan nature: not in the old-fashioned “See Naples and then die” sense, as advocated by Goethe, or the one we see in crime news and TV series, but in its vital energy and artistic creativity. It’s for this reason that Rak sought to lend most of the characters Neapolitan voices, coming courtesy of Lina Sastri (who provides the narrating voice, Yaya’s aunt, which is somewhat overbearing), Ciro Priello of the YouTube group The Jackal, Fabiola Balestriere Massimiliano Gallo and Federica Altamura, who are joined by Francesco Pannofino and Tommaso Ragno.

Yaya e Lennie is produced by Mad Entertainment in league with RAI Cinema, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture’s Film and Audiovisual Department, the Campania Region and the FCRC. International sales are in the hands of RAI Com.