Picha

Jean-Paul "Picha" Walravens (Brussels, Belgium, 2 July 1942) is a Belgian cartoonist, comics artist, animator and film director. He is most famous for his adult animated films, such as Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle.

Jean-Paul Walravens, quickly fascinated by drawing, studied at the Institute of Fine Arts Saint-Luc. In 1960, he contributed his work as a caricaturist and cartoonist for many newspapers and magazines around the world including National Lampoon and The New York Times. During this period, he adopted the pseudonym Picha. A passion for drawing led Picha to the world of comics. He is the author of several books, as Picha at Club Med (1971) or Persona non grata (1975).

After this period, he went on to animation. In 1975, he co-directed the film Tarzoon: Shame of the Jungle, a raunchy parody of the Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The film was a huge success in its home country Belgium and in France, but ran through troubles with the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate when the estate sued the creators of the film for plagiarism. The estate lost the case when the creators stated that the film was a parody. However, when the film was released in the U.S., the estate demanded that the film title and main character "Tarzoon" be changed due to the film's nature degrading the Tarzan name. In 1979, the now R-rated film was released under the title Shame Of The Jungle, and was rewritten by Saturday Night Live writers Anne Beatts and Michael O'Donoghue and was dubbed by John Belushi, Johnny Weissmuller, Jr., Bill Murray, and several others. Despite these efforts, the film was a critical and financial flop.