Pipo y Pipa en busca de Cocolín Review: Jerky, weird, and wonderful

If you love ultra-rare Spanish animation from almost a century ago, you need to track this down right now. But if you get easily annoyed by jerky movements and silent-era weirdness, you will probably hate it.

Honestly, I did not expect to ever find a copy of Pipo y Pipa en busca de Cocolín. It is based on the old drawings by Salvador Bartolozzi, who was basically the Spanish Disney of his day but way more trippy. 🧸

The plot is just Pipo and Pipa looking for their toy friend, Cocolín. That is pretty much it, no deep subtext here.

There is this one scene where a character moves their arm and it looks like a paper cutout is about to fall right off the screen. It is incredibly charming but so, so clunky.

The way Adolfo Aznar put this together feels less like a movie and more like a puppet theater show that someone recorded on a dare. It has that same strange, erratic energy you find in other oddities from the era, like Call Her Sausage.

I love how the background does not even try to look real. It is just flat cardboard with trees painted on them, and sometimes you can almost see the shadows of the actual animation stand.

Its definitely not as polished as big budget stuff like Broadway Gondolier from around the same decade, but this has ten times the personality.

Sometimes the characters just stare at the camera for three seconds too long. You wonder if the animator went to grab a coffee and left the camera running. ☕

It is super short, which is great because the music they usually play over these silent prints can give you a headache after ten minutes.

If you can find a dusty copy online, watch it on a rainy Sunday. It's a tiny, forgotten piece of history that deserves a little love.