15h00 | Praça ProgressoThis year marks the 30th anniversary of Tale About the Cat and the Moon, a landmark in Portuguese and international animation. To celebrate, Pedro Serrazina — whose artistic work is renowned for its rich and multifaceted creativity — is the spotlighted author at the 5th Perspectives on Portuguese Animation Symposium.
Pedro Serrazina is an award-winning director, senior lecturer and animation researcher. His short Tale about the Cat and the Moon Tale about the Cat and the Moon premiered at Cannes (1996) and, as part of the Portuguese National Cinema Plan, is still shown worldwide. His work spans film, site-specific installations site-specific, music videos and academic projects. Focused on the intersections between architecture, public space, documentary and animation, his PhD explored animated space as a reflection on social space. Animation Practice, Process and Production he was artistic director of the 45th Cinanima Festival and is currently developing his new film, What Remains of Us. What Remains of Us.
This 5th edition of the Symposium Perspectives on Portuguese Animation pays tribute to director and researcher Pedro Serrazina, who was involved in the creation of this cycle during his time as artistic director of CINANIMA Festival.
It is deeply fitting that this symposium coincides with the anniversary of the release of the film Tale about the Cat and the Moon, a film in which we are transported to the director’s poetic imagination about the city of Porto.
As this is a landmark film, Pedro Serrazina is an author whose complete works are worth continually rediscovering, or discovering for the first time – as countless generations have done over the years – an encounter that has been greatly appreciated and astonishing, as we can count on such a beautiful work as part of our audiovisual heritage.
It is hoped that the theoretical contributions of this symposium will serve to inform and enrich the public about this author’s work.
Sahra Kunz holds a degree in Fine Arts – Painting – from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto (1997). She obtained a Master’s degree in Sound and Image from the Portuguese Catholic University (2001).
She holds a PhD in Design from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of the Basque Country (Bilbao – 2011).
Since 1998, she has been a lecturer on the Sound and Image course at the Portuguese Catholic University, teaching subjects including Design Tools, Pre-Production Design, History of Animation, Animation Theory, Animation Workshop, Final Animation Project Production and Dissertation.
Literature and cinema, poetry and animated film become two faces of an Alchemy, insofar as they constitute two arts of transmutation of heterogeneous materials — multiple metamorphoses produced in the laboratory of creative freedom. Art is the supreme form of freedom and transgression, and the dialogue between the arts the supreme form of artistic creation. Edgar Morin considers cinema “a magical spectacle of metamorphoses.” Manoel de Oliveira justifies the interinfluence between the arts by saying, “I make films because I don’t know how to write.” Picasso reveals, as if the brush were a film camera, the repetition of different angles.
Pedro Serrazina’s work traverses this intense dialogue between words and drawings: a dialogue of metamorphoses, allusions, contrasts, rewritings, and reconfigurations. An alchemy that reveals to us the gaze of words, materialised in the moving drawing, and the lunar uncertainty of poetry reflected in the movements demanded by the film camera.
Associate Professor at UTAD and a full member of iA* Research in Arts. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and directs her research within the field of interarts studies, particularly in the relationships between literature and cinema, and literature and architecture. She teaches several seminars on film discourse analysis and on the dialogical relations between cinema and other arts. She has presented papers at numerous conferences and has published in both national and international journals. She has been invited to give lectures at international universities and has served on juries and led workshops at national and international film festivals and film school showcases, as well as on the national ICA juries.
In animated films, sound goes beyond merely accompanying the image; it structures, suggests and reinvents what is seen. This article analyses the sound in Pedro Serrazina’s animated short Tale about the Cat and the Moon to investigate the impact of sound on the construction of narratives in animated films. Based on a constructivist methodology, we conducted a survey that sought to understand how the sound universe is capable of generating mental images, emotions and meanings. The responses suggest that sound influences the imagination, designs spaces and sets the pace of the narrative. In this study, we seek to understand whether sound in animation acts as a narrative and poetic force, capable of shaping the way we experience films.
Bernardo Bento was born in 1995, in Porto. His interest in music and sound led him to explore theatre. He completed a BA in Theatre – Lighting and Sound Design at ESMAE in 2017. Since then, he has worked on dozens of productions in the performing arts sector. In 2020, he finished his MA in Sound Design at the Portuguese Catholic University, transitioning into the art of cinema. In this field, he has worked on over 50 short and feature film projects. Since 2022, he has been teaching several BA and MA courses at ESMAE and UCP. His research focuses on the relationship between soundscapes and acoustic ecology in animated cinema.
This presentation examines the work of Pedro Serrazina through the relationship between domestic space, the neighbourhood, and the city, considering animation as a practice of social observation. In films such as Tale about the Cat and the Moon (1995), Within (1998), Rethink – Community Heroes (2020) e Shadows of Ourselves (2025), the home emerges as an intimate core from which memories and belongings extend into public space. Serrazina highlights the tensions between proximity and fear, affection and surveillance, proposing counter-maps that restore social density and the right to the city.
Lecturer at FLUP (Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto) and Assistant Researcher at Sociology Institute from the University of Porto (Artistic Creation, Cultural Practices and Policies). She coordinates the National Study of Roma Communities (2024–2026) and the Observatory of Art and Culture in Higher Education. She holds a PhD in Sociology of Education (University of Minho, 2016) and a postgraduate degree in Performance (Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, 2017). Her research and artistic practice focus on the city, inequalities, and participation, with an emphasis on creative, collaborative, and ethnographic methodologies.
Pedro Serrazina’s animations are full of holes that either tear or open up the space of the drawing to other spaces, sometimes without a precise dimension and sometimes without a place that can be identified. Sometimes without time and sometimes evoking time. These holes are doors, windows in doors, gazes, mirrors, or openings created by the clash between shapes. I will try to approach these holes as modules that persist in his work.
PhD in Visual Arts and Intermedia – Drawing, from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (2012). He was Director of the Caldas da Rainha School of Arts and Design ESAD.CRat the Polytechnic of Leiria between 2016 and 2025, where he is a coordinating professor. Artist. Full member of LIDA – Design and Arts Research Lab ESAD.CR Polytechnic of Leiria), which he directed between 2015 and 2020. Linked to the RUN-EU alliance of European universities since its creation, he has been responsible for its Communication, Dissemination and Impact since 2023.
In animated films, sound goes beyond merely accompanying the image; it structures, suggests and reinvents what is seen. This article analyses the sound in Pedro Serrazina’s animated short film Tale about the Cat and the Moon to investigate the impact of sound on the construction of narratives in animated films. Based on a constructivist methodology, we conducted a survey that sought to understand how the sound universe is capable of generating mental images, emotions and meanings. The responses suggest that sound influences the imagination, designs spaces and sets the pace of the narrative. In this study, we seek to understand whether sound in animation acts as a narrative and poetic force, capable of shaping the way we experience films.
José Vasco Carvalho holds an MA in Multimedia Arts from the University of Porto and a PhD in Science and Technology of the Arts. He is a researcher at CITAR – Research Centre for Science and Technology of the Arts. His work develops around two main areas: film sound and sound art in public space. He explores the relationship between sound, image, and space through the creation of devices and experiences that articulate soundscape and audiovisual narrative. He has contributed to the sound production and post-production of more than 70 short and feature films, collaborating with filmmakers such as Rodrigo Areias, Gabe Klinger, Edgar Pêra, Laura Gonçalves, Vasco Sá, David Doutel and Alexandra Ramires. The films he has worked on have been screened and awarded at numerous national and international festivals, reflecting a trajectory that intersects artistic research, cinematic practice, and sonic experimentation.
In recent decades, many artists have distinguished themselves by transgressing the boundaries of their initial training in architecture. From Gordon Matta-Clark to Tomás Saraceno, numerous artists have sought, through this particular form of disobedience, to escape the growing constraints that limit architecture’s creative potential. In a forward-looking move, they thereby allowed themselves to continue expanding notions of space that, during modernity, the discipline of architecture had claimed as its own. Pedro Serrazina discovered this very freedom in the world of animated cinema.
Pedro Pedro Gadanho is an architect, writer and independent curator based in Lisbon. A 2020 Loeb Fellow from Harvard University, he was curator of contemporary architecture at MoMA, New York, and the founding director of Lisbon’s MAAT museum. PhD in Architecture and Mass Media by the University of Porto, he is the author of Climax Change! How Architecture Must Transform in the Age of Ecological Emergency.
2026. CINANIMA 24. All rights reserved
Made with passion ❤ by CIRCLETEC
