director's notes
  
Honolulu Baby takes place in a different period of Colombo's life, one in which theatrical pretensions and the fragile illusions of creativity have been abandoned for the daily grind of tackling a Big Mac or a do-it-yourself furniture kit from IKEA and above all mastering the Anglicized version of everyday Italian, without which you can't boot up a PC, read the colour supplement in the paper or even play a game.

Quite simply, the idea which fascinated me was that this same daily struggle with a foreign language goes on everywhere, in all non-English-speaking countries. In France, Spain, Germany they have the same furniture from IKEA, they eat the same burgers at McDonald's, they have the same problems trying to work out what error message 2 means when their PCs quit all programs without warning.

Twenty years after RATATAPLAN, living without speaking is a luxury we can no longer afford. And if we have to speak, we have to speak English!
Twenty years after Ratataplan, Alberto Colombo, engineer, returns to the screen in a new adventure. Back then it was a bizarre kind of aptitude test which prevented Colombo from getting a job with a multinational corporation where English was the in-house language.

In those days Colombo could still live on the outskirts of a big city and get away with a proud, determined mutism, making silence a healthily creative dimension.

Today, hired at last by that same big-name corporation, married to a woman with a career and surrounded by new telecoms technologies, no way can he still avoid using English, the language he loves to hate.

On the contrary, his elementary knowledge of English takes him far away from Italy, to live through his most incredible adventure yet. In a world called the global marketplace, where distances have been cut and ambitions expanded, dreams can come true in the strangest of circumstances, even on the other side of the world.