La Linea

John Martz | June 23rd, 2006

I loved watching La Linea when I was a kid, so I was thrilled when someone sent in this link to a site with over 50 La Linea shorts. La Linea was an Italian animated series in which the character of an infinite drawn line interacted with the cartoonist/animator (a very minimalist Duck Amuck). Like the very best pantomime cartoons, La Linea is pure animation; although there’s dialogue, it’s essentially gibberish, and all the storytelling is done by the drawing. If you recognize the voice of La Linea, it’s Carlo Bonomi, the voice of Pingu.

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  • Greg Casiglia
    I loved The Great Space Coaster! Does anyone remember Frannie, the gorgeous 16 year old brunette singer/guitar player/ female lead on the show who used to tickle Puppet Goriddle Gorilla while wearing a gold ring on her ring finger? I remember The La Linea Italian chalk animation shorts as well! Please sign the bring back the great space coaster online petition @ www. petitiononline.com/TGSC because it now has 2,156 signatures. There's also The Great Space Coaster Homepage @ www. great space coaster.com. Have A Happy 4th of July everyone! And God Bless The U.S.A.!
  • nostalgia attack! just a week ago we discussed this at the office and couldn't rememeber the name of the cartoon.
  • TRoyal
    Ha, never mind. Just read the actual post. :)
  • TRoyal
    Yay! I'm glad people liked the link I sent. I was afraid it would be mistaken for spam. I LOVED these. My question: Is the character speaking another language, or just gibberish?
  • Ross
    Hey. You can actually buy every episode ever made on 3 dvd's from Amazon's German website. As yet I cannot find them anywhere else, but I have the first 2 so far [1st one at http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000AMK3J/galenicom06-21 ]
  • Hey

    That was an amazing trip to past with you. I just revive all my old memories that I have since I was a small child. That was an exciting thing

    Thnx alot for taking me to my childhood
  • Kim
    Ha! Thanks for the reunion! I remembered this from The Great Space Coaster and have tried searching for it in the past but didn't know it was a phenomenon outside the show. One of the characters on tGSC had a little pocket-sized flip-up TV that he showed the cartoons on.
  • Andrea
    La linea was born for some Lagostina's, short's in 70 as the majority of italian animators or comics maker have not the consideration he deserve but is usual in italy we could have the great pencil, but if they work for comics and animation considered as minor art they will suffer of low consideration for a lot of their life.
    a curiosity Linea really speak is a mixture of italian, Lombard dialet, some english word, and a lot of uncomprensible words. i suggest you to see another great here http://www.bozzetto.com/welcome.html give a look to the flash for some minimalistic fun
    and search jacovitti u will be surprised...
    bye
  • La Linea is very common in Germany. At least in the area where i am living. There are TV screens in the subway stations that show the current news, weather and some ads and in between they show La Linea so you can always watch it while waiting for your tube.
  • Joe
    What a great site! I had totally forgotten about these animations, but I remember I used to love them. Thanks for the post!
  • Lone
    Great find. I cant say Ive seen this exact show but no doubt its been influenced or has influenced other animation like it (im thinking old WB or Disney). Dont know really. But loving minimalism this is about as perfect a minimal animation as you can get I think :) I think itd be hard from someone with a vector program to duplicate this.
  • Bec
    When I was really little I used to think I was stupid because I didn't understand what they were saying.
  • Harvey
    it looks like a penis.
  • OH MY GOD! it WAS on the great space coaster! i still have my gary gnu doll sitting in my room! i love these cartoons, thanks for posting the link!

    "there's no gnews like good gnews...."
  • Oh my- I had an instant trip to the past! I used to see it in Italy when I was a child- thanks!
  • Naseem
    Over 50?!!
  • YES! That's where I remenber that from, plus French CBC used to run it on some of it's children's programming. Thank you for the link!
  • they used to play these shorts on the kids show "The Great Space Coaster" in the early eighties.
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