Faulas

Faulas is an educational animated series in stop motion cut out which re-elaborates nursery rhymes and sayings from popular tradition in a playful, ironical manner. The series takes its cue from local, still current sayings whose true meaning has however been lost, and uses them to tell universal stories. Combining the ability for memorizing rhyming couplets with playful atmospheres created through illustrations for children, and the cut out technique, it is capable of charming both kids and adults. Faulas is a horizontal series, in each self-contained episode, a calm but firm voice narrates in rhyme the misadventures of the protagonists: they are lazy, absent-minded, bungling and lively kids whose behaviour epitomizes the nursery-rhyme at the core of an episode.

Director’s statement
Faulas stems from my personal visual research into traditional Italian folk sayings and the stereotypes that characterise their language, or rather the rhetorical figures with which the language is usually expressed. My grandmother used to call me and my cousins by nicknames that echoed traditional stereotypes, and as I grew up and travelled, I rediscovered similar fascinating popular sayings and stereotypes. Moreover, on my island, Sardinia, we use a
minority language that UNESCO has defined as being on the verge of extinction, so Faulas stems from a strong desire to pass on the sayings of our ancestors to new generations, creating a light-hearted audiovisual product, with the ultimate aim of keeping the language alive, suitable for a younger audience but also capable of captivating a more nostalgic one. I am convinced that Faulas has a very broad potential, and that one day it could be narrated in other languages, for everyone likes puns and every culture has its own linguistic peculiarities.