Level 1
The short animated film A Brief History [Scurtă istorie], created by the Romanian filmmaker Ion Popescu Gopo, provides a thought-provoking depiction of the history of life on Earth, set in motion by a “cosmic sneeze”, and invites the audience to reflect on what it means to be human. By compressing and sequencing history into comic episodes and vignettes, the film leads viewers into a light-hearted fable about evolution and expansion. Within its nine-minute runtime, Gopo’s film presents human history while also poking fun at it through absurdist gags and anachronisms that break with logic and reality, in a symbolic and essentialized narration. Through this approach, the filmmaker demystifies the idea of linear progress and the conventional historical narrative.
With minimal means of expression, in an anti-Disney approach that eschews beauty, colour, and tenderness, the animation illustrates the joy but also the absurdity of existence: Gopo’s “little man” plants a flower at the bottom of the ocean and proceeds to water it; he then plays a swordfish as if it were a stringed instrument in a jazz ensemble, cheered on by dancing shoals of fish. Traversing the earth, exploring the oceans, and finally reaching outer space, while also moving across time, the journey of “the little man” is presented in a playful, rather than a heroic or dramatic register, with the filmmaker subtly cautioning against taking ourselves too seriously. The recurring gesture of planting a flower wherever he goes signifies human sensibility and creative impulse, but may also be interpreted as humanity’s inclination to expand and colonize the land. Contemporary film critics have interpreted the flower as a message of peace in the context of the Cold War. A Brief History thus encapsulates the multifaceted tension between apparent optimism and underlying doubt.
The film’s influence and prestige were firmly consolidated by the Palme d’Or it received at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957 and by its many sequels featuring ” the little man”. Before 1989, its success was capitalized on by the communist cultural establishment, and again in the last two decades. Owing to its stripped-down, brief, and highly symbolic formulation of an anthropological constant in an ever-changing history, Gopo’s “little man” has, over the decades, become emblematic of Romanian cinema: the national film industry awards - the Gopo Awards, established in 2007 - feature a statuette representing the character.
Level 2
In 1957, Romanian animated cinema was virtually unknown outside the country’s borders. And it was not very popular in Romania either. It had its artisanal beginnings in the 1920s and the 1930s, when intrepid and passionate creators such as Aurel Petrescu, Marin Iorda, and Dem Demetrescu made short animated films with limited resources and no support from state institutions; some of these films could not be finalized or distributed in theatres. The National Cinematographic Office, established in 1938, financed only a few propaganda animated films. The post-war regime change brought the first sustained attempt to industrialize and professionalize the medium: a specialized department was improvised in 1950 within the Bucharest Film Studios. From two titles in 1950, the department’s small but dedicated team managed to produce 15 short animated films in 1955. Then, the big bang occurred.
Three births
It is only appropriate that Ion Popescu Gopo’s A Brief History [Scurtă istorie] starts with a “big bang”. Or, to be more precise, a “cosmic sneeze”, a humorous representation of the birth of our solar system. In the beginning, the Sun sleeps, and the planets, stars, and comets adorn his resting head like blonde curls, earrings, and hairpins. The Earth serves as his nose, but the blue planet is moist, so the Sun ends up sneezing. This is the “big bang” that generated our solar system.
Gopo declared to the press that the idea of the film came to him in the summer of 1956, while he attended the Karlovy Vary Film Festival as a member of the Romanian filmmakers’ delegation. There, he watched, as a work in progress, the animated feature film The Creation of the World [Stvoření světa/La Création du monde], directed by Eduard Hofman and based on the comic drawings of Jean Effel. Stimulated by this Czechoslovak-French co-production, Gopo started to imagine his own version of the creation of the world and planned to go even further with his Brief History: “A foray into the past, present and future of humanity, which the Romanian filmmaker set out to achieve in eight minutes of film, a speed - let’s face it - that is astonishing even for the atomic age!”1M. Marinescu-Sandu, “Eight billion years in eight minutes!!” [“Opt miliarde de ani în opt minute!!”], in: Flacăra, 6, no. 10/107 (May 15, 1957), 5. ↩.
After the “cosmic sneeze”, A Brief History takes its viewers to a prehistoric Earth covered with dinosaurs, where the human being is born (Gopo frequently uses anachronisms for comic effect). A dinosaur chasing a fly wakes up a primate sleeping in a tree. The monkey is knocked out of its tree, breaks off its tail on a branch, and its face flattens upon impact with the ground. The first man is born. He takes his first faltering steps, falls again, and, when trying to get up, sees a flower rising from the ground. A sensitive soul, he takes it in his hands and deeply inhales its aroma. The fragrance of the flower makes him so happy that he begins to sing, but only the echo answers him. The flower would become, symbolically, the visual element (or the “prop”) that identifies him. The viewers have witnessed the genesis of “the little man with the flower”, the most popular character in Gopo’s filmography, as well as in the history of Romanian animated cinema.
Film critic Dinu-Ioan Nicula claims that Gopo had the idea of an animated film featuring a solitary hero since 1939, when the 16-year-old and his father, the cartoonist and caricaturist Constantin Popescu, initiated, a short animated film named, after its protagonist, Lobodă, in the so-called “Popescu & Sons” family studio2Dinu-Ioan Nicula, Journey in the World of Romanian Animation [Călătorie în lumea animației românești], Meridiane, Bucharest 1997, 19. ↩. They completed only a few meters of film, which were not preserved, but the future director revived this idea when making A Brief History.
The artist later known as Gopo looked up to his father (“Gopo” is, in fact, a pseudonym obtained by agglutinating the first syllables in his mother’s maiden name, Gorenko, and his father’s last name, Popescu3Dana Duma, Gopo 100, UCIN, Bucharest 2023, 13-14. ↩) and started by following in his footsteps, as an author of drawings, caricatures, and comic strips published in various journals and magazines in the 1930s and the 1940s. When the animation department of the Bucharest Film Studios was established, he started making films there, alongside his father and other directors, such as Matty Aslan, Bob Călinescu, Iulian Hermeneanu, and Olimp Vărășteanu. Gopo found some other gifted artists there, such as Liviu Ghigorț and Pascal Rădulescu, whose drawings played a major role in the films he directed, culminating in A Brief History.
Gopo’s first short animated films (1951-1955), with their adorable anthropomorphic animals, were hugely indebted to the highly imitated style of Walt Disney. Gopo himself admitted that he was obsessed with Disney, whom he would visit in his Burbank studio in 1962 (when it is said that the creator of Mickey Mouse offered the Romanian filmmaker a screenwriter position, which Gopo politely refused). However, when conceiving A Brief History, Gopo decided to distance himself from the Disney model: “When I realized that I could not match his technical perfection, I started making anti-Disney films. Therefore, beauty - no, colour - no, tenderness - no. The only area in which I could compete with him was the subject matter. […] I made a little man with a great economy of lines. His eyes are two dots, he cannot roll them over, and he cannot throw a gallant look. I voluntarily reduced my possibilities. His mouth is almost motionless. I did not use facial expressions either. But the subject gained strength. The attention paid to the content increased”4Dana Duma, “A 60-year-old young man: Gopo” [“Un tînăr de 60 de ani: Gopo”], in: Magazin estival Cinema 1983, 27. ↩. This is how the minimalistic-drawn, sexless figure that would become famous as Gopo’s “little man” was born.
Finally, A Brief History can be seen as the birth certificate of modern Romanian animated cinema. The first film featuring “the little man with the flower” was selected in the short film competition of the tenth edition of the Cannes Film Festival and received the first Palme d’Or for a short film (before 1957, the shorts competed for the Grand Prix du Festival, as did feature films before 1955). Gopo was not the first animated film director to win the top prize of the short competition, as two years before him, the Scottish-Canadian director Norman McLaren, another major representative of the medium, won the Grand Prix with Blinkity Blank. And in 1957, Gopo had among his competitors two other important animators: John Halas/János Halász (The History of the Cinema) and Břetislav Pojar (The Little Umbrella [Paraplícko]).
For Romanian cinema, A Brief History received the first Palme d’Or from a list that currently comprises three more trophies for short films (won by Mirel Ilieșu in 1969, Cătălin Mitulescu in 2004, and Marian Crișan in 2008), as well as one for a feature film (Cristian Mungiu in 2007).
In 1957, the reputed film historian Georges Sadoul saluted Gopo’s victory: “His film accumulates in ten minutes new poetic ideas in a humorous narrative full of rhythm and imagination. Most remarkably, his film owes absolutely nothing to Disney, nor to [Paul] Grimault, nor to [Stephen] Bosustow, nor to the Czech or Soviet schools. This little film was a discovery at Cannes that deserved to be recognized with the brilliance of a Grand Prix”5Georges Sadoul, “An exceptional festival, but an unworthy list of prizes” [“Festival exceptionnel, palmarès indigne”], in: Les Lettres françaises, no. 672 (May 23, 1957), 6. ↩. A discovery that put Romania on the world map of animated cinema.
A history of the costume
After he starts walking, “the little man with the flower” needs clothes. First, in a memorable gag, he takes the skin from a leopard (or an ancestor of today’s leopards), under the shelter of another tree; subsequently, the animal reappears skinless, just as a transparent figure, enraged at being expropriated. According to Gopo, the following sequence (described in detail by the director) was the starting point for the film:
“Initially, there was no script. There were a few drawings, then more, they were linked together and made a story… It was a sort of history of the costume, starting in prehistory and ending in 1955, at the bottom of the waters flooded by amphibious people.
The first drawing was a staircase with steps made of boulders, wood, stone, clay bricks, concrete and iron, and, finally, steel and plastic, powered by atomic energy. On the first step a man dressed in animal skins climbed, on the second he was dressed in a costume from the time of the Egyptians, on the third he wore a Greek costume, on the fourth a medieval iron costume, then, adorned with purple silk and lace, he jumped to the next step, also placing a tall or flat hat on his head, until the little man dressed in modern clothes jumped onto the automatic staircase from the top of which he looked back at the history of the costume”6Ion Popescu Gopo, Films, Films, Films, Films [Filme, filme, filme, filme], Meridiane, Bucharest 1963, 6. ↩.
This history of the costume is turned by the idealistic filmmaker into a utopic history of humanity. As Eleanor Cowen observes, “[o]ther than his attire, the little man traverses through life and time fundamentally unchanged, keeping a hold of his flower as man proceeds to populate the Earth”7Eleanor Cowen, Animation Behind the Iron Curtain, John Libbey, London 2020, 156. ↩.
The peaceful conqueror
Men, women, and children, accompanied by the roar of a stadium full of people, replace the dinosaurs that formerly covered the Earth. As the blue planet becomes overpopulated, humanity needs to expand into another universe: the ocean.
One of the most successful films of 1956, both in the West and in the East, was the documentary feature The Silent World [Le Monde du silence], by the oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau and the filmmaker Louis Malle; The Silent World won the Palme d’Or in Cannes that year. Inspired by the French film, Gopo imagined an entire world living underwater. Initially, “the little man”, in a diving suit, plants his flower on the bottom of the ocean and waters it (another comic impossibility). The flower begins to grow and, eventually, rises above the water. Meanwhile, the hero starts conquering - peacefully and harmoniously - “the silent world”, which is not silent anymore. Using a swordfish as a stringed instrument, “the little man” starts making music for the underwater fauna (anthropomorphic, obviously). While a jazz tune plays, humans start populating the ocean, building an entire city under the waves. As farm animals humorously dive into the water, “the little man with the flower” requires more space. Cosmic space is the next frontier.
When discussing A Brief History, both Gopo and his critics invoked the context of the International Geophysical Year8The International Geophysical Year (July 1, 1957 — December 31, 1958) was a large-scale international scientific cooperation project, that enabled collaboration between scientists from the Eastern and Western Blocs during the Cold War, with the aim of studying the Earth and the cosmic environment, marking the beginning of the space age and the launch of the first satellites. ↩ as a marker of modernity and novelty, influencing the film’s astronomical references and cosmic imagery (e.g.: the humanized satellite inspects a star with a magnifying glass, wipes it of dust, and calls the Earth to report). “The little man”, now in a cosmonaut suit, flies off in a spaceship and lands on the Moon. The sequence pays homage to Georges Méliès, a pioneer of cinema (and science fiction films): in an iconic image from his 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon [Le Voyage dans la Lune], the anthropomorphized Moon’s face has a space capsule (the bullet-shaped rocket used for space travel by Earth’s astronomers) embedded in its right eye. “The little man” plants his flower on the Moon’s surface, and then he repeats his defining act on countless other planets, filling the universe with flowers. A Brief History concludes on a very optimistic note, enhanced by Dumitru Capoianu’s musical score, but the question mark after “The end” makes viewers (from 1957 and from today as well) wonder if such a conclusion is plausible. It certainly is in the realm of animation. As Dana Duma puts it: “The ability of animation to materialize abstractions and concepts is ingeniously used in A Brief History, as in almost all subsequent episodes of the Little Man series. Starting from upsetting editorial topics, passionate meditations are developed on the destiny of contemporary man”9Dana Duma, Gopo 100, 23. ↩.
Reductive critical reception and political instrumentalization
The critical reception of the film in Romania was decisively shaped by the Palme d’Or won in Cannes, a prize perceived as a prestigious form of external legitimization for Romanian animated cinema. The complexity of the film’s message was reduced to some extent in favour of a unifying ideological interpretation, circulating pacifying messages in a context marked by the Cold War and the anxiety of the nuclear age.
The overall tone of the film was framed in contemporary commentary as a teleological fable tracing the history of humanity, its message simplified and symbolically “domesticated” through the avoidance of ambiguities and open interpretations. The emphasis fell on the film’s humour and on the symbol of the flower, as a central leitmotif, a “symbol of peace and friendship”10D. C., “The gold medal in Cannes: A Brief History” [“Medalia de aur la Cannes. Scurtă istorie”], in: Scînteia, 26, no. 3910 (May 19, 1957), 3. ↩ - an avant la lettre flower power message. Recurrent topics in reviews revolve around the origins of humankind and human progress, conceived as being linear and universal.
A Brief History was widely praised by critics as a “masterpiece” worthy of “a place of honour in the treasure of world cinema”11G. Mihail, “A masterpiece of animation: A Brief History” [“Capodoperă a desenului animat. Scurtă istorie”], in: Steagul roşu, 4, no. 1008 (June 30, 1957), 2. ↩, a reception that contributed to the rapid canonization of the film. Central and regional daily newspapers, acting as primary vehicles of mass discourse and official cultural propaganda, reinforced an already established interpretation, while progressively flattening the film’s message: its reflexive dimension blurred, the optimistic message absolutized, and Gopo consecrated as a “master who has perfected his art”12Virgil Pop, “Instead of a review of the film A Brief History” [“În loc de cronică la filmul «Scurtă istorie»”], in: Romînia liberă, 15, no. 3959 (July 2, 1957), 2. ↩.
The international recognition obtained at the Cannes Film Festival generated a favourable context for symbolic appropriation, with the Palme d’Or serving as an instrument of external validation for the national state-run cinema. In numerous press texts, the specific category for which the prize had been awarded - short film - was omitted, allowing for an ambiguous association between Gopo’s achievement and the Palme d’Or for feature films, perpetuated throughout the years13“Gopo, 20 years after the Great prize in Cannes…” [“Gopo după 20 de ani de la Marele premiu de la Cannes…”], in: Cinema, XV, no. 5/173 (May 1977), 15. ↩. The award was further used to enhance the prestige of the Bucharest Film Studios, with the success being associated with figures from the communist cultural leadership, such as Constanţa Crăciun (then Minister of Culture). The film was thus presented not only as the result of Gopo’s individual talent, but also as a production made possible within a favourable institutional framework14Mariana Pîrvulescu, “A dream, a film and a gold award: A dialogue with Ion Popescu Gopo” [“Un vis, un film şi un premiu de aur. De vorbă cu Ion Popescu Gopo”], in: Romînia liberă, 15, no. 3922 (May 19, 1957), 2. ↩.
Articles in Munca (the newspaper of the trade unions) exemplify a celebratory and propagandistic discourse, placing A Brief History within a genealogy of European fantasy cinema - by linking it to René Clair’s Beauties of the Night [Les Belles de nuit]15L. B. [Lucia Bogdan], “A Brief History - the great success of Romanian animated film” [“Scurtă istorie - marele succes al filmului romînesc de desen animat”], in: Munca, 13, no. 3013 (July 4, 1957), 2. ↩ -, and by converting Cannes into ideological capital, interpreting the film’s success as proof of the intellectuals’ integration into the collective project: “intellectuals walk side by side with other working people”16Dan Plutaşu, “The military parade and the demonstration of working people in the Capital” [“Parada militară şi demonstraţia oamenilor muncii din Capitală”], in: Munca, 13, no. 3056 (August 25, 1957), 2. ↩.
However, not all Romanian critical responses exploited the Cannes award as a means of validating the film’s artistic value. Mihail Lupu proposed what was probably one of the most liberal positions permitted at the time, neutralizing the symbolic weight of international success and distancing himself from dependence on Western validation: “It is certain, nonetheless, that A Brief History would have won the support and admiration of film lovers in our country even without this prior international recognition. Because good taste, imagination, and authentic art do not need certificates to impose themselves”17Mihail Lupu, “A cinematic gem: A Brief History” [“O bijuterie cinematografică: Scurtă istorie”], in: Scînteia tineretului, 12, no. 2536 (July 3,1957), 2. ↩. In this reading, the author made explicit the pacifist dimension of the film’s message, integrating into his reading the anxiety of the atomic age, which was countered by the calm and serenity of the Gopian universe embodied in “the little man with the flower”. This shift in emphasis introduced a crack in the dominant discourse, without departing from the bounds of ideological acceptability.
Ion Popescu Gopo’s interviews in the Romanian press played an essential role in establishing the author’s public voice and stabilizing the dominant interpretation of A Brief History18For a compilation of Ion Popescu Gopo’s interviews, see: A century from the Gopo universe (I): The animation [Un veac din universul Gopo (I). Animația], dir.: Daniela Ciolan, eds: Alexandru Stănescu and Dragoș Smărăndescu (TVR Cultural, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVSiPPEsOk (accessed April 22, 2026). ↩. Through these texts, the director explained his intentions, provided insightful commentary, and contributed to the canonization of a humanist-pacifist reading. This authorial discourse, which privileged the film’s central idea as a “hymn to man and his creation”19Pîrvulescu (May 19, 1957), 2. ↩, organized the synopsis into an emotional narrative about creation, progress, and peace, an interpretative pattern resumed in the majority of subsequent articles.
Very soon after his Cannes success in 1957, Gopo increasingly asserted himself on the international film scene as a knowledgeable insider, without becoming an explicit partisan of official ideological discourse. He subtly applied the criteria of left-wing ideological critique, signalling, for example, the influence of Western production interests on the selection processes of international film festivals: “some capitalist film companies have unquestioningly imposed their films on the selection committee”20Adrian Uti, “In Venice: An interview with Popescu-Gopo” [“La Veneţia - Interviu cu Popescu-Gopo”], in: Tribuna, 1, no. 35 (October 5, 1957), 8. ↩.
The destiny of an animated film auteur
In this post-Palme d’Or context, Gopo no longer appears merely as the recipient of an international award, but as an author with a coherent and forward-looking body of work, a status confirmed by his subsequent films. First, he continued the adventures of his “little man” in three other short animated films, which would compose, alongside A Brief History, an acclaimed tetralogy: 7 Arts [7 arte, 1958], Homo Sapiens (1960), and Alo! Hallo! (1962). Until 1987, Gopo made 19 other animated films featuring the same hero (a protagonist also in numberless caricatures and comic strips drawn by the artist over the years), ranging from the very short films included in his two Pills [Pilule] anthologies (1966 and 1967) to the montage feature film Quo vadis, Homo Sapiens? (1982).
When he directed his first live-action feature film, A Bomb Was Stolen [S-a furat o bombă], selected in the main competition of the Cannes Film Festival in 1962, Gopo conceived the part played by the leading actor, Iurie Darie, as an equivalent of his animated “little man”. The final sequence of the feature film, in which the flower of “the little man”, fertilized with nuclear energy, multiplies rapidly and fills the entire field, brings back to mind the optimistic conclusion of A Brief History. In his subsequent feature films, Gopo would hybridize live-action and animation - most remarkably in Maria Mirabela (1981) - and would develop the topics introduced in A Brief History, for example in the 1975 science fiction film Fantastic Comedy [Comedie fantastică], where the inventor played by the same Iurie Darie represents yet another avatar of “the little man”.
The consolidation of Gopo’s position on the international film scene is revealed in an article by Ov. S. Crohmălniceanu from 1958, when Gopo headed the national delegation at the “Romanian Film Week in France”. At this point, A Brief History was no longer perceived as an isolated success, but as part of an emerging body of auteur work, integrated into the canon of world animated cinema. Gopo’s placement alongside major figures in international animation, such as Walt Disney, Norman McLaren, Stephen Bosustow, Paul Grimault, and Jiří Trnka, confirms this shift in status and the overcoming of a purely festival-based form of recognition: “Gopo was once again the star. In Arts, André Martin speaks of him as one of the leading names in animation”21Ov. S. Crohmălniceanu, “The week of Romanian film in France” [“Săptămîna filmului romînesc în Franţa”], in: Contemporanul, 12, no. 23 (June 13, 1958), 4. ↩. In this sense, it can be stated that both in Gopo’s career and in the history of Romanian animation, A Brief History functioned as a pivotal film, consolidating the author’s career and the international visibility of local animated cinema.
As a result of the international recognition of his animated short films, in 1960, when ASIFA, the International Animated Film Association [Association Internationale du Film d’Animation], was founded at the reputed Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Gopo was elected vice-president, with Norman McLaren as the first president. Between 1969 and 1973, Gopo was the head of the TV and cinema propaganda department of the World Health Organization in Geneva.
Back home in Romania, Gopo’s huge influence contributed to the foundation in 1964 of the specialized Animafilm Studio (whose annual production would reach over 60 short films in the 1980s) and in 1966 of the Mamaia International Animation Film Festival, with three editions until 1970, a period during which it was the second most important specialized festival in the world, after Annecy. Unfortunately, the only international film festival organized in Romania before 1990 was banned after its third edition, as it had become inconvenient following the ideological reorientation of the communist leader Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1971. Hoping to save the Mamaia Film Festival, Gopo intervened in favour of temporarily transferring its licence to Animafest Zagreb; but the transfer became permanent. Romania would only gain a similar film festival in 2006, with the first edition of the Animest International Animation Film Festival, which quickly became one of the most important specialized events in the region. In 2007, Gopo’s memory was again celebrated when the newly-established awards of the Romanian film industry were named the Gopo Awards; moreover, the trophy handed out to the winners of these awards, conceived by the artist Adrian Ilfoveanu, represents Gopo’s “little man”, thus continuing the long series of triumphs started with the big bang in A Brief History.
Mihai Fulger & Ioana Apostol
Image caption
Ion Popescu Gopo (Bucharest, 1923 — Bucharest, 1989), The Stairway [Scara], black-and-white drawing summarizing the initial sequence from the colour short animated film A Brief History [Scurtă istorie], reprod. from: Ion Popescu Gopo, Films, Films, Films, Films [Filme, filme, filme, filme], Meridiane, Bucharest 1963, 8.