Antoine Selim Ibrahim

Giannalberto Bendazzi's book Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation will be a great help in getting this blog started, but there are times when I have trouble following up on the information provided by Bendazzi. A good example is with the case of Antoine Selim Ibrahim.

According to Bendazzi, Ibrahim was born in Cairo on 11 November 1911. In 1938 he made Aziza and Youness in El Shiek Barakat's Book, notable as the first animation to have an Arabic soundtrack. He made three more films in the following decade, including 1940's Dokdok.

The website of the Torino Film Festival (which claims that Ibrahim was born in 1910, not 1911) says that he made Islam and Aziza, an Italian-German co-production from 1959, with co-director Farid Al Mezzawi. The site describes this short as "A cartoon about the friendship between a child, who loves animals, and a bird, who is searching for a medicine for his young." Was this the same Aziza who starred in the 1938 cartoon?

After a stint of animating commercials and title sequences for films, he moved to America where he found work at Hanna-Barbera and DePatie-Freleng.

Beyond this, I've had no luck in finding anything about him. Any information would be greatly appreciated.