His family moved to Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1900, and Quirino spent his childhood soaking up the fast pace and left-leaning politics of the great southern metropolis.
[1] Living in the capital was another Italian immigrant, Federico Valle, once a cameraman and director in Europe who had used Wilbur Wright's visit to Rome in 1909 as the opportunity to film the world's first aerial cinematography, now a producer of newsreels for his adopted country.
He hired the twenty-year-old Cristiani off the street, gave him Émile Cohl's Les Allumettes animées (Animated Matches, 1908) to teach him the technique, and set him loose.
Cristiani, doing the lion's share of the animation, managed to accomplish his goal -- the 58,000-frame El Apóstol: an hour and ten minutes at 14 frames per second, the film premiered on November 9, 1917 and was destroyed in 1926.
The movie was a satire, with President Yrigoyen ascending to the heavens to use Jupiter's thunderbolts to cleanse Buenos Aires of immorality and corruption.
Cristiani saw the incident as the perfect opportunity, and with a new set of producers created the world's second feature-length animated film, Sin dejar rastros in 1918.
Some of the titles included Firpo-Dempsey (1923) on the boxing match between American heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey and Argentinian champion Luis Firpo, Uruguayos Forever (1924) on Uruguay's Olympic gold medal in soccer, and Humberto de garufa (Little Umberto's Folic, 1924), on the visit of Italian Prince Umberto of Savoy to Buenos Aires.
Cristiani converted the operation over to sound partway through, including a few songs in the soundtrack; he used the primitive sound-on-disc system for the recording since it was unlikely that most Argentine theaters would be able to handle sound-on-film at the time of release.
Then, on September 6, 1930, a year into production, work on Peludópolis was halted when President Yrigoyen was ousted by a Conservative military coup d'état.
With so much invested in the film so far, Cristiani decided to proceed, re-arranging the plot to de-emphasize Yrigoyen and the sharks, and carefully adding the characters of the generals as the heroes, in an attempt to protect himself from possible persecution.
When Walt Disney came to Argentina as part of his Latin America research tour, Cristiani showed his films to him, then sent him to cartoonist Molina Campos, the source of the gaucho segment in Saludos Amigos (1943).