Animatsiya in English

Four years after her poetic film about ancient family grief, director Galina Barinova moved into the science fiction genre with this strange, engaging, nearly wordless film.



The animation in Galina Barina's films is awe-inspiring. In this particular film, the methodical, smooth slowness of the movements, coupled with the innovative art direction remind me a bit of "The King and the Mockingbird", and even more so of Richard Williams' "Thief and the Cobbler". Even the majestic first appearance of the dragon brings to mind the first appearance of the War Machine. The beautiful art direction exudes a strange, timeless, enchanting atmosphere, with a bit of grittiness added by using a certain texture behind the colours. It fits perfectly with the scenario of the film, which may be set in the remote future or in the remote past.

The story is a cycle - like an ouroborous (the mythical dragon that eats its own tail). The film starts by introducing us to a worker who works at a strange factory that endlessly makes circles into squares and back again (a bit of foreshadowing, there). At the end of the day, he retires to his home and to his beloved lady. Unexpectedly, the media singles them out and makes them into celebrities, who must provide entertainment for the city's television-addicted inhabitants. The scene of the couple being pursued by giant video cameras on legs is one of the most memorable in the film for me.



But this seemingly charmed life has a terrible price. Because of her elevation to the position of "most beautiful woman in the city", the man's beloved is taken away for sacrifice to a terrible mechanical dragon that menaces the city. The theme of the sacrifice of the damsel to the dragon is ancient and recognizable in many countries. It is also present in a good amount of Russian folklore.

The grief-stricken man is donated resources by the city's citizens to go destroy the evil. And he goes... but in the end, he becomes what he is fighting, and the cycle begins anew. The people in control change, but the beast doesn't, for the people within the beast no longer perceive it as such. And this, too, is an ancient and fundamental idea. For example, to this day, we all know that governments take up the habits that they were fighting against once they gain power.

Also, it would be an injustice to not mention the wonderful synthesized music that so perfectly captures both the lyrical and the action-filled parts of the film.

---

Galina Barina has made two masterpieces, from what I have seen. "When the Sand Will Rise..." is one, and this is the second. In her earlier films, she experimented with other techniques. Notably, many of her early films, until the mid-1980s, used cutout animation. But I have to say that her way of animating is far more suited to traditional animation. It took her a long while to find mastery with her voice, maybe because her voice is so distinct. Many of her other films either lack a solidly-presented screenplay (and the overall impression of them is rather average), or are just too strange to make sense of (as is the case with her wordless adaptation of a famous Tatar poem, "Şüräle" - though it gets better on repeat viewings).

Of her later early-1990s films, her 1991 adaptation of Ivan Bilibin's artworks, "Ivan Tsarevich and Grey Wolf", is not a bad film but feels stilted and constrained, almost like a history lesson. It feels stifled by the source material, rather than inspired. Her 1993 film about "Jester Balakirev" (her last work) feels even more awkward, despite the screenplay being written by two respected masters of writing and directing, Leonid Nosyrev and Anatoliy Petrov. Perhaps the problem with those two films is that they feature heavy use of dialogue, while Barina's best films feature almost none.

(photo originally posted here)

For a number of years now, Norshteyn has enjoyed going swimming in mid-winter. You can see a video of it at 4:30 in part one of a Japanese documentary about him that was uploaded to Youtube a little while ago.

The same documentary features extensive footage from The Overcoat, Norshteyn's on-again, off-again feature film project since 1981.

There are about 12 minutes in total, with most of it in part 3:



More footage is at:
Part 1: 00:00-00:50
Part 9: 5:39-7:21

The entire documentary (including part 7, which is currently missing on Youtube), can be downloaded here (455mb). There are, unfortunately, no English subtitles. (the download link will stay active unless nobody downloads the file for 90 days)

To learn more, click on the "norshteyn" tag below and read some of the translated interviews that have previously appeared in this journal (for example, this one from 2007).

Another Russian Sherlock Holmes parody? Sort-of, but by another name.

In 1986-7, Aleksandr Tatarskiy and Igor Kovalyov, working at Ecran Studio, made a 4-part 20-minute film called "The Koloboks Investigate". There are two main characters, of which Chief is a parody of Sherlock Holmes, and Colleague of Watson (there are no actual direct references to Holmes' world, however). The film has been translated to English twice, first by myself, and a bit later by houzdog03 (who was unaware of my version). Both are good translations.

The characters proved too popular to just disappear. Their first return was in a comic book in 1992. Then in the mid-1990s, as the head of Pilot Studio, Tatarskiy had the idea to resurrect them in a more substantive fashion, renaming them the "Pilot Brothers" (not because they're pilots, but because that was the studio's name). Since then, under that name, they've appeared in several TV series, adventure games, commercials, and even in an animated direct-to-video feature. The Russian Wikipedia article has more details. Unfortunately, none of the mid-1990s short films have ever been released on DVD, and many of them I could only find with poor image quality.

The first film to appear, in 1995, was "The Pilot Brothers Film a Clip for MTV" (animator.ru). I guess "The Pilot Brothers Sell Out" could be another good name. :) This was sponsored by Suprimex, and their logo is all over the film (not unusual for Russian animation of the time - in fact, even the 18th "Nu, pogodi" episode was sponsored in this way). The music you hear is the Russian imitation of Western rock music, which was quite hip at the time. I can't say that I'm a fan of the music, but there is a lot of energy in the animation.

(If subtitles appear to be missing: Click on the triangle at the bottom right of the video, and make sure that CC is turned on.)



5 further films were made in 1996, of which I've subtitled 3:

"The Pilot Brothers Suddenly Decided to Go Hunting" (d. Sergey Gordeyev, animator.ru)


"The Pilot Brothers Sometimes Go Fishing" (d. Vassili Bedoshvili, animator.ru profile)


And perhaps the craziest one of them all... "The Pilot Brothers Make Spaghetti for Breakfast" (d. Aleksandr Tatarskiy animator.ru profile)


The remaining two are "The Pilot Brothers Show Each Other Tricks" and "The Pilot Brothers Drink Tea in the Evening". I'll translate them when someone uploads versions with better video quality.

"Bald Mountain". This name has survived among the people as an echo of ancient mythical notions. It is a mountain where witches and evil spirits gather to cook magical herbs and make spells. And this "mountain" is none other than the sky itself.

This was the ONLY film that Soyuzmultfilm released in 1998, and in 1999 they released no films at all. At the time that this film was being made, the once-mighty studio was in its death throes. Its management had become tied to organized crime and the studio's assets were deliberately being sold to enrich the bosses. Hired thugs were being used to keep the employees in line and the police didn't dare interfere. It was a regular occurrence for animators to come to their desk only to find all of the materials gone, sold to the highest bidder. These events are described in more detail in Georgiy Borodin's 2003 article. That was the environment in which Galina Shakitskaya directed this impressive film, her debut as director (before that, she had worked as an art director at the studio since 1977).

The animation was made with paint-on-celluloid, a technique also used by Vladimir Samsonov. And like most of Samsonov's films from the early-to-mid 1980s, it is a nearly wordless symphonic poem.


A few words: The film contains some pretty frightening Satanic imagery, but it also optimistically contains two characters that are obviously meant for children to sympathize with: a little elf-like-girl and her lamb who live among the multitude of naked witches and demons. It feels a little strange. I suppose it's possible that some children would be fine watching this; like a good scary story. But I suspect that this was a product of inertia more than anything; Soyuzmultfilm had been making films for children for so long that it was hard to let go.

Though I doubt that this was widely seen by anyone when it came out. It did screen at the 4th Open Russian Festival of Animated Film, where it won 8th place in the audience voting.

Here is Vladimir Samsonov's film "The Bread's Light" (1983), which has some similar stylistic features (same animation technique, for example). These two films are both structured around fairly long orchestral musical compositions, and both are about storms.

If I may, I would just like talk about Igor Kovalyov for a bit.

I recently finished watching all of the films in which he was the real director; meaning not co-director with Aleksandr Tatarskiy in the 1980s, and not working on dreary corporate properties such as his commercial work in the 1990s and 2000s.

I will say this: many people don't like Kovalyov's films because they don't understand them. Also, many people (though fewer in number; mostly you see their type at certain film festivals) like Kovalyov's films precisely because they don't understand them. Me personally, I just don't understand them. I generally like the artistic direction and what you might call the "acting", but I have little of intelligence to say one way or the other about the films themselves. I wouldn't know whether an illustrated novel written in Inuktitut was any good, either.

The most understandable of them for me is probably "Bird in the Window", but that's because the entire film is summed up in the first minute. All that follows is the details.

But usually, I'm stuck wondering what is meant to be real and what is meant to be a metaphor, and trying to remember the little details seen for a fraction of a second that must mean something symbolic (because I can't help but notice that those little repeating symbols are very meticulously arranged). Often, I'm just trying to figure out what the heck is REALLY going on. For example, in "Flying Nansen", is there really a woman or is that just Nansen's delirium? And why are there planes flying overhead? In "His Wife is a Hen", what is the caterpillar-like pet with the face of the main character supposed to represent? And what exactly is the man with the black mask? In Andrey Svislotskiy, what exactly is the film about? At the very end, there is text that says "This all happened within 30km of the city of Kiev in the town of Bucha. I was the only witness of these events. - Andrey Svislotskiy". Andrey Svislotskiy was actually a coworker of Kovalyov at Pilot Studio. He made a brilliant surreal film in 1992 called Hypnerotomachia (based on Francesco Colonna's 1499 Romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili), before leaving with Kovalyov for America to work at Klasky Csupo and never directing another film again.

The contrast between these films and the rest of Kovalyov's work is striking. The films that he co-directed with Aleksandr Tatarskiy in the 1970s and 1980s (such as Plasticine Crow and The Koloboks Investigate) are very different in tone. I frankly cannot find Kovalyov's stamp in them. They are very much like the films that Tatarskiy later directed solo; full of quick-thinking clownery.

The commercial work that Kovalyov worked (and works) on in America, also, seems to have no distinguishing features; it seems to generally be untarnished by vision or artistic skill, and could have been made by anyone. His latest work on The Drinky Crow Show is a good example. Probably it pays in Hollywood to be so subservient to those who hire you that none of your own personality shows in the work that you do. In "The Rugrats Movie" for example, Kovalyov said in an interview that he basically had no creative freedom. But I wonder how he can stand it, and whether he likes any of his commercial work.

Chris Robinson wrote a long article about Igor Kovalyov a while ago. If you can get past the sometimes vulgar language, it is a pretty informative read (though for interest, compare Kovalyov's version of his beginning in the 1970s and 1980s with his colleague Tatarskiy's. Kovalyov mentions hating every minute of working at "Ecran" studio, while Tatarskiy writes nothing of the sort). The films "His Wife is a Hen" and "Bird in the Window" are explained better in the article, while the explanations of "Andrey Svislotskiy" and "Flying Nansen" make it seem like the films don't really HAVE a clear point.

Kovalyov's latest film, Milch, is the only one that I actually dislike (though the incomprehensible and aimless "Flying Nansen" comes close). I watched it once but got nothing from it except a bad feeling. The art direction and animation, which in Kovalyov's earlier films is ugly but also interesting, here is just ugly, being more sharp and angular and less organic than his earlier work. The story was, to me, completely incomprehensible. And yet, this film has won some big festival awards, beginning with winning the Grand Prix at KROK (the story behind that is that the whole jury except for Yuriy Norshteyn, who was the head of the jury that year, wanted to give the Grand Prix to another American film. But Norshteyn argued for a long time that "Milch" deserved the award, and eventually brought the others around. In the audience rating, however, "Milch" didn't enter the top 10)

Most of Kovalyov's movies can be seen on Youtube, while "Flying Nansen" I think can only be seen on Global Tantrum.

( Read more... )

Vitaliy Shafirov, a former student of Tatarskiy who left for America and worked at Klascy Csupo studio (now he is in Australia), put up a video about Norshteyn's trip to California, 10 years after the fact:
( Click here for parts 2 and 3 )
Click here to download in better quality:
113MB

(posted to norshtein also)

P.S. I'm working on an article about Norshteyn's "Good Night Children" sequence from 2000. I already posted the video to norshtein, over here, so head on over and take a look if you haven't already.


P.P.S. Just a PSA: Fan-profiles for Yuriy Norshteyn exist on MySpace and Facebook.

Thank you to alek_morse for bringing this to my attention.

"The Treasure Under the Mountain" is a feature film that was never finished or released, based on Tolkien's "The Hobbit". Only the prologue survives. This video dates from about 1994, and was made by the company which is now called Argus International (list of films). It was Roman Mitrofanov's first directorial work. alek-morse speculated that maybe work was stopped because artists in Russia were just finding out about how copyright laws limited what they could make.

Translation/subtitles were made by myself.

Full text of song from the video:

Goodness and laughter, laughter and joy
Smiles light up the faces of all
and souls, like windows, are thrown wide open.
The sky up above shines clear and blue.
No-one wants to believe that bad dreams may come true,
nor know that some day
that some day the weather will worsen.

But the tempest arrived, as is always the case.
Disaster moves in to take merriment's place,
With fire and armor and no shred of mercy.
The desperate bell rings too late to assist,
And how will a mere paper dragon resist
a brave paper dragon
against one that's real?

When all is stretched thin by eternity's freeze,
When all is enveloped by blankets of time,
The Earth bit by bit becomes merged with the sky,
And night bit by bit becomes merged with the day.
But somebody here's left a track in the snow
which leads to a faraway
which leads to a faraway hope.

The rhymes aren't perfect, but I came closer than I thought I would while still keeping the translation accurate.

A more recent (and very different) film by Argus International is "My Life" (2000), which won the Annecy award for funniest film. It is directed by Natalya Beryozovaya. Here it is on Youtube with English subtitles which were added by someone other than myself:

(wiki entry)

Or rather, did on July 17. Oh well, better late than never. Congratulations!

Mikhail Tumelya, his friend and occassional helper, has some pictures over here, including a few of Petrov working on a film:
http://tumelya.livejournal.com/142932.html


Petrov's latest film My Love has been gathering quite a few awards all this while, including several in Russia, and also in Australia and Brazil.

It has also been subject to heated discussion (Russian link) at the animator.ru forums. Some intense criticism has also come from Chris Robinson, head of the Ottawa International Animation Festival, who suggests that Petrov may have boycotted his festival, and thanks him for saving them both a lot of trouble.

One of the main complaints from some quarters (including Robinson) has been Petrov's realism. This interesting AWN interview says that about 20% of the film was done with a kind of rotoscope. Mikhail Tumelya has a short post over here about that. Petrov often does base his characters on real actors. The following image was NOT done with a rotoscope, but was a series of images painted by Petrov of the actress's head to be used by his assistants on "My Love":

It is worth noting, of course, that Petrov's films also contain many fantasy segments (or unlikely situations) which would not be possible to do in live action. There are some things I find a little strange about the position of those who take issue with the realism of Petrov's films:
-would it be better if he filmed everything live-action except for the fantasy sequences? Would that not make the transition between them quite abrupt?
-is it (in their view) just generally innappropriate to combine "dreams" and realism in a film (or in an animated film)?
-is there such a fundamental distinction between animation and live-action filmmaking that the two function on completely different principles and should never overlap? (Brad Bird would disagree)

Personally, I think that this criticism simply comes from the fact that the Western artworld is in one of its periodic moves away from realism (which, if history is any judge, will last for the next several centuries at least, if not millenia).

The criticism coming from some of the "top tier" of Russian animators has been of an altogether different sort; some, including Yuriy Norshteyn and Ivan Maximov, believe that there is an overload of technical artistry and not enough subtlety/economy in the film (though the film still made Norshteyn's list of "top 5" at the last Open Russian Festival of Animated Film).

And at the same time, most people really love the film. Maximov himself says (in that animator.ru discussion) that he is more critical of Petrov's work than he is of his own, because he thinks that Petrov's work aims to reach something much higher than his own films do.

But let us now go back a bit. Here is an early film (1986) based on Dr. Seuss's tale in which Petrov was art director (this was during the long period when he was trying to find his style). The director is Alexei Karayev,


Here's Petrov's very first film as director, which was co-directed with Mikhail Tumelya when they were both students. It's called "Marathon", and it was widely shown when Roy Disney and some American animators visited the USSR in 1988. Apparently, it made quiet an impression on them.


Petrov's first solo film, and his "diploma" work, was "The Cow", which was produced at Pilot Studio. In the words of Yuriy Norshteyn (being interviewed on the show "Ночной полёт", 13-03-2007):
His first film "The Cow" was an immediate phenomenon. It was a diploma work and a full-fledged film at the same time, and incidentally was nominated for an Oscar. What's surprising is that it didn't win. Now that was one film which should have won, because it was in all respects a NEW film, of a new psychology.


Then came two films called "Dream of a Ridiculous Man" and "The Mermaid". They are also worth watching, but aren't available on Youtube or on any English-language DVDs.

The film which finally did win Petrov the Oscar in 2000 was made in Canada and called "The Old Man and the Sea". It was the first animated film to be released on IMAX.



Petrov has said that his next film will be made to celebrate the 1000-year anniversary of his home town, Yaroslavl. He hasn't settled on any one idea yet, but I guess we can look forward to something by 2010.

All the best!

Belarusfilm, though founded in 1928, did not become an animated film studio until 1972 (there was one earlier stop-motion coproduction with Soyuzmultfilm in 1963). Since then, however, the studio's films have gained many fans - at least within Russian-speaking territories. In the 1990s, Belarusfilm was one of the few Soviet animation studios that did not fade away (unlike Kievnauchfilm, Kazakhfilm, Armenfilm, Azerbaijanfilm, Georgia Film, Tajikfilm... most of these either died or went into hibernation).

On the contrary, it continued to make innovative films at about the same rate as before. Now, I don't claim to know the details of how things work at the studio or what their history was in the 1990s, but their films show that they continue to have much artistic freedom (more importantly: artistic freedom for the sake of a film rather than experimentation for its own sake) and continue to explore and refine new unique animation methods. They also continue to be very unknown outside of their own country and perhaps Russia. I suppose politics may be the reason for that.

Anyway, I would like to present two interesting films from the 1990s by Belarusfilm (subtitles by myself, as usual).

The first one, called "Forest Tales", is rather strange, poetic, and full of symbols and meaning. It features a highly-developed use of what seems to be powder animation.

"Russian/Belarus animation: Forest Tales (+English subs)" on Google Video

I wouldn't hesitate to match this film up against Norshteyn's "Hedgehog in the Fog"... high praise indeed, but I think it deserves it. The voice acting is spectacular, and you do lose quite a bit if you don't understand Russian.

The second one, called "The Tale of the Blue Cloak", has a completely different style and tone, but has some engaging storytelling and catchy music:



I recommend watching them in their original size rather than stretched out, which seems to be the default option.

(credit for picture: Andrey Kuznetsov)

I'm starting this journal with the purpose of providing an English-language source of news and commentary about Russian animation (as well as all Eastern European & Soviet animation to some extent). I don't know how much demand there is for such a thing, but I figure I may as well start it and see what happens.

Of course, it is only natural to start off by mentioning the situation at Soyuzmultfilm, the former enormous creative powerhouse of animation in the Soviet Union which almost completely collapsed during the 1990s.

Soyuzmultfilm's recent history is a mess in every sense of the word. I've recently tried to update and make more accurate the wikipedia article somewhat, but there's still a lot of work to be done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuzmultfilm

The confusing legal standing of the studio (which is actually officially two studios now), doesn't make things any easier. One entity called the Soyuzmultfilm Film Fund officially owns all of the catalogue prior to March 1, 2004 (at least I think so), while another entity is responsible for creating and selling new films. On the one hand, the official mission of the awkwardly-translated "Creative union of the "Film studio "Soyuzmultfilm" («Творческо-производственное объединение «Киностудия «Союзмультфильм») is to become commercial and sell off its shares, which are currently owned by the Russian Ministry of Culture (see this radio interview). On the other hand, director Akop Kirakosyan has repeatedly said that he's dedicated to producing quality films first and foremost, while creating some "filler" films to fill the economic needs. I suspect that the New Adventures of the Parrot Kesha are among of the "filler" films. They use well-known characters but are, in my opinion, of a far lower level (both in terms of art and direction) than Soyuzmultfilm's other recent films, which is a bit of a shame since those characters used to star in films which were themselves classics...

Information about the Soviet years is missing, and I'm still not sure how Sergei Skulyabin (the guy who took over the studio illegally in the mid-1990s, had the legal director beat in an alley and used hired mafia thugs to keep order) was finally deposed in 1999. The whole twisted story is posted in Russian over here (written in 2003) (to be honest it was such a depressing read that I couldn't read past the halfway point).

Also, there's currently a developing story about American company Films by Jove's rights to 547 of the studio's films. The legality of Films by Jove's ownership has been a constant source of conflict for over 7 years, and there's a chance that it might finally be coming to a close (see the section in the wiki article). In fact, I'll bet that the real reason that Soyuzmultfilm split into two parts is so that one part can deal with the legal controversies that the 1990s left behind them, while the other can make a fresh start. A legally-uncertain future kills the creativity that is necessary to create good films, as the 1990s clearly showed, so it would've made sense to separate them. Both of them still use the same building, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them merge again after all of the problems are sorted out.

Currently, Soyuzmultfilm is steadily working on a feature film called Gofmaniada with Mikhail Shemyakin. 20 minutes are currently finished, but it's having difficulty attracting Russian investors despite quite positive audience and media reactions at the screening last fall.