Religion: Blasphemous Genesis?

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God is a cheery little old baldhead with a shaggy white beard and a nightshirt down to his bare feet who bustles about creating the world, the sky, the sun and moon and Adam and Eve with an air of happy surprise. The Devil is a horned and hairy-bottomed practical joker who tosses what monkey wrenches he can into Cod's works. The angels are busy little helpers; they drape swatches of fabric around the skinless animals so that the Creator can judge which hide suits which beast; they also hold up various kinds of sky like wallpaper samples.

This is the world of French Cartoonist Jean Effel (concocted from the initials of his real name, François Lejeune), whose whimsies about the first two chapters of Genesis have made bestselling booklet after booklet in France. He also collaborated with Czech Movie Director Eduard Hofman to make a 90-minute feature film out of the series. The result, called The Creation of the World, took top prize for animated cartoons at this year's Venice Festival, and won the Silver Gondola for excellence awarded for educational and cultural films.

That would undoubtedly have been that, if Rome's daily Avanti had not remarked that the Venice jury had honored a movie ridiculing religion. The Vatican's Osservatore Romano followed up with an editorial headed BLASPHEMOUS PARODY WINS PRIZE. "Designed to diffuse atheism," cried Osservatore. "The show amounts to making a grotesque laughingstock of the Holy Scriptures and implicitly of God Almighty himself.''

Countered Rome's pro-Communist press: Osservatore's kind of "strict ideological defense'' is partly responsible for the low state of Italian culture; as for Effel's pictures, they are "breezy," "charming," "graceful," "creative." Said Cartoonist Effel. a militant left-winger: Osservatore Romano has every right to criticize the film, although "they never seem to worry about religious ceremonies shocking the layman." Back came Osservatore with a blast at a sequence in which the Devil warms up Eve for the apple scene by bouncing her off in a frenetic rock 'n' roll. "This caricature of the female half of mankind would be enough to justify our protests. Nowhere does the Bible say that the female human was under devilish influence or in connivance with the Devil."