This film used cardboard cutouts as the form of animation, a choice Cristiani would stick with throughout his career. This short film did surprisingly well, and Valle announced a new project: the green animator would next create the world's first feature-length animated film, with President Yrigoyen as the subject. The funding would come from a Mr. Franchini, who owned a chain of movie theatres to show the finished film. Cristiani would get his character designs from newspaper cartoonist Diógenes Taborda (pen name "El Mono", "The Monkey") Cristiani managed to accomplish his goal, doing the lion's share of the animation, the 58,000-frame El Apóstol (an hour and ten minutes at 14 frames per second) premiered on November 9, 1917 and 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. The result is a burnt city. The film was well-received, but most of the praise went to producer Valle, with what was left over going to Taborda. In 1918, the German commander in Argentina, Baron von Luxburg, decided to manipulate Argentina into joining World War I on its side by sinking an Argentine ship and blaming the act on the Entente. The tales of the survivors of the incident led nearly everyone to realize what really happened, but Yrigoyen swung his political weight to cover the incident up, out of fear that Argentina might be pushed into the war as an enemy of Germany, an outcome he feared just as much as a German alliance. 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. The title (Leaving No Trace) was a reference to von Luxburg's supposed order to the German U-boat captain who sank the ship. President Yrigoyen felt he had no choice but to order the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to confiscate the film the day after it premiered. In doing this, the Radical showed himself little better than the repressive Conservative presidents he had replaced. On the other hand, Cristiani was not imprisoned and spent the next several years creating political cartoons and caricatures for the newspapers. Two other animated features were put out at this time by Andrés Ducaud, the man who designed the fire effects in El Apóstol. To support his growing