STEFI, the character
Taken from the stories of Grazia Nidasio, the series narrates the story of an 8 year old girl, Stefi, who is always fighting with the adults. School and family, the city and the systems ruling it, all form the background for comical and realistic adventures that are observed and solved with smooth irony.
Each episode starts from an element dealing with the domestic universe (her mother, her brothers and sisters, the holidays, schools, money and expenditures), nonetheless seen throughout the polyhedral personality of a restless and imaginative little girl.
Stefi has an older sister and an older bother, a dog and, obviously, two parents; she is the she is the “child” of the house and, as it usually happens, she believes she is not heard enough. She is curious, she asks thousand of questions that are often unanswered and she will discover she can come up with the solution just observing and working with her own head.
Even tough she is basically a realistic child, Stefi is able to carry away her problems to the world of imagination, brightening with magic even real characters. These escapes to an imaginary world are part of her creativity and they enable her to accept her reality and to survive. At the same time she does not give up criticism to reveal and redimension the fake myths suggested by adults.
She experiences her journey with, her lifelong friend-enemy, a boy with rigorous logic but burdened by boredom, limitations and doubts due to the fact of being an extremely rich and extremely lonely child.
It will be Stefi who, unintentionally, will teach him that even the most ordinary reality may, thanks to imagination and creativity, reveal pleasant and amazing aspects.
Stefi’s ability to observe things unconventionally, but with lots of genuine love, and her solid wisdom allow her to discover the world from an ironic and funny perspective, the inly one that may enable her, at last, to accept it with dynamic and redeeming power.
Stefi’s adventures have been published in Great Britain for compulsory schooling, in Spain in Castilian and Catalan in illustrated books and in primary-school books and in Turkey in the children’s magazine Cocuc.
In France, it became part of the Spanish language teaching programs thanks to Nathan.
Stefi has been published in numerous European and non-European magazines: Belgium, Holland, Spain, Israel, Greece, Turkey, Yugoslavia, Brazil and Argentina.
The English edition, sponsored by the British Telecom for the MB, has been published in Sweden and Norway.
In Italy, it is currently published weekly in the newspaper Corriere della Sera as current affairs cartoon within the pages concerning Culture and, from 1997 to 1999, it has been edited in the children’s section of the Spanish newspaper El País.
In Italy, Stefi’s animated cartoons are on air on Channel 3 of the National Television Network.