Mariscal: “I keep drawing because I have never been to a psychiatrist”

BarcelonaJavier Mariscal (Valencia, 1950) can't quite process the fact that the Animac Festival in Lleida has awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award, which he will collect this Sunday at the closing ceremony. "I'm not an animator," he excuses himself, "I'm nothing!" And yet, he has done everything: comics, textiles, sculptures, paintings and designed everything from venues to Olympic mascots... But he hasn't always been welcomed with open arms. "Miquel Barceló told me not to paint, that my comics were the best. My comics were the best."The Viper The same: "What beautiful furniture you make." Oscar Tusquets told me: "Don't make furniture, your paintings are very beautiful." The art world didn't forgive me for having works at 30,000 euros in a gallery and then selling them at a newsstand. And thank goodness I didn't win the Oscar with Chico & Rita or the animators would have shot me."

Having just turned 75 –he gathered his children and grandchildren to celebrate in the house where he has lived for some time in the Empordà–, Mariscal continues to create tirelessly. His latest obsession: painted ceramics that are "fired" using a technique. , he says, that no one criticizes him anymore for being so scattered: "When the word became popular, multidisciplinary I noticed that they stopped insulting me." He simply does his thing, without calculations or strategies. "If I continue drawing it is because I have never been to the psychiatrist," he says. "I don't reflect on what I do or why. My friend Miquel Barceló always stands in front of a painting and reflects when he finishes it, but I don't know how to do it. At school, when I had to reflect, I fell asleep. I ride a Vespa and I don't look in the rearview mirror much."

His first contact with animation was in the early seventies. "I spent more than 15 days animating one of my characters, Señor del Caballito, and I didn't even make it to 10 seconds," he remembers. "I said to myself: 'Animation is great, but you need more friends and more money.'" In the early nineties he created the animated series that he starred in. Cobi, the mascot of the Barcelona Games, but it was a frustrating experience due to the lack of ambition of those responsible for animation. "Their system was to do things very cheaply to save money for the production and earn it, so they didn't pay any attention to me," he laments.

His first major animation project, Chico & Rita (2009), arose from his great friendship with Fernando Trueba, who after seeing Mariscal's animations for a Compay Segundo video clip (The black Tomasa) and the notebooks he had drawn in Havana, he suggested making a film. "We set it in Cuba in the 1940s because that was when everyone danced, and Fernando controlled it more," explains the cartoonist, who last year repeated with Trueba in a new project, The pianist was shot, about the Brazilian pianist Tenório Júnior, who was murdered by the Argentine dictatorship. "Fernando had worked on the project for four years and did all the interviews," says Mariscal. "Nobody, not even in Brazil, knows more about Tenório than he does. I told him: "Fernando, I'll provide the drawings, but that film is yours." But he insisted that we be two directors. Fernando's only flaw is...

Mariscal doesn't hide…not even during the promotion of the film– that in The pianist was shot There are things that he is not entirely satisfied with. "The film has some downfalls, and you can't allow that," he says, despite being very happy with the dream sequence, the first one he animated alone. He does not know, however, if he still has the energy for bigger animation projects: "I don't ask myself these questions. I just wonder where I will get the money to live until I die, because I live from day to day. I have gone bankrupt three times, and the last time I bought it from leather to love at an age and now my mother bought it at an age, but it would never have occurred to me. I am very hippy and I have not bought a house, we live in rented houses."

Between the 'New Yorker' and the Big Bang

Living in the present shouldn't be that hard when you've just signed up. a cover for the special edition for the 100th anniversary of the New Yorker. Mariscal does not hide his pride: "It is the best, to sneak Fermín [a character from the Garriris] into the New Yorker, the magazine of my teacher Saul Steinberg!" Mariscal has known Françoise Mouly, the art director of the magazine, since he was collaborating on Raw, the magazine that Mouly and her husband, Art Spiegelman, ran, with whom she is friends. But of the current authors that she admires, one stands out above all: Joann Sfar. "He's a master. I was looking for someone to write a script for me and I wrote it for him, and it seems that he knows me and admires me a lot. Also, he can speak Spanish perfectly because he is a Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jew on his mother's and father's side." However, the project that has kept him busiest in recent years is "a 200 or 300-page graphic novel" that he is preparing alone, a sort of history of life on Earth. "It talks about the common origin of all living beings, how bougainvilleas and humans have cells that are first cousins," he says. "And the first ten pages explain what there was before the Big Bang: the dance of the electrons, the crazy parties in the cores of the stars... But I don't know when I will finish it."