Cartoons on the Bay 2.1, the Festival of cross-media animation and children’s TV promoted by Rai and organized by Rai Com in collaboration with RaiPlay, unveils its dates. It will be an edition with three souls: Digital, Live & Hybrid. Three different forms for a festival in continuous evolution, which will have most of its programming in streaming, but which this year also has as its objective three days of screenings in presence for the public of L’Aquila, from 3 to 8 December , as a taste of the three-year period in which the Festival, from 2022, will be hosted in Abruzzo. It is Andrea Cascioli who signs the poster for the 2021 edition, starring Nathan Never, the hero of the Sergio Bonelli Editore team, who celebrates his 30th anniversary on June 18, 2021. It was in fact the same day in 1991 that the Alfa Special Agent arrived at Italian newsstands for the first time. “With the presentation of the poster signed by the artist Andrea Cascioli, the 2021 edition of COTB starts, which sees us proceed with confidence on the road back to post-pandemic normality – says Teresa De Santis, president of Rai Com – The event will in fact take place in the large digital RaiPlay square, increasingly frequented also by young audiences, and with screenings in December in presence in L’Aquila . At the heart of Cartoons, once again, the creativity and inspiration of animators, designers, authors, producers and broadcasters from all over the world, united by the desire to give ageless emotions through stories and animated images, in a journey that unites tradition and technology “. The poster of Cartoons on The Bay 2.1 was conceived just like the cover of a Nathan Never book, with all the graphic elements that it reads ri have learned to recognize since the now legendary number 1. Alongside Nathan Never we find his companion Sigmund Baginov, the computer genius of Agenzia Alfa. In the background, the Pulcinella of Cartoons on the Bay watches over both, while the companions of Agenzia Alfa and the posters of the previous editions of the Festival float in cyberspace. “With the image of the 2.1 edition of COTB we wanted to pay homage to one of the characters most popular of Italian comics “, says the artistic director of the Festival Roberto Genovesi. “For me – underlines Genovesi – that in a previous life I made both the role-playing game and the video game of Nathan Never is a pleasant déjà vu and also a way to reaffirm the vocation of COTB as a festival in which animation, comics and video games are part of the same DNA. The official manifesto of Cartoons on the Bay 2.1 represents a change of gear in the collaboration between the Festival and Sergio Bonelli Editore, which will be marked by a series of initiatives that will be announced in the coming months “.