Segundo Festival de Mortadelo y Filemón, agencia de información
1970 · 59m · España
Directed by Rafael Vara
Genres: animation, comedy, family
An animated compilation of eight Mortadelo y Filemón shorts made at Estudios Vara, reuniting the slapstick adventures of the two bumbling T.I.A. agents.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 1970 Spanish animation omnibus sounds like a footnote, but Vara's refusal to Americanize slapstick—letting the gags breathe in their own anarchic logic—is genuinely weird in the best way; most scouts would've walked past this, which is exactly why it matters.
Vara's eight-part structure demonstrates a curator's understanding of how comedy operates as formal variation: each segment riffs on the bumbling-agent premise with escalating visual ingenuity, the kind of disciplined repetition-with-difference that anchors itself in a European animation lineage most programmers have forgotten.
The real move here is Vara's decision to let silence and timing do the work instead of drowning the gags in music—that single editorial choice transforms what could've been forgettable family fare into something with genuine comic precision, the kind of restraint that reveals a filmmaker thinking hard about every frame.