Everything about The History Of Russian Animation totally explained
The
history of Russian animation is a very rich, but so far nearly unexplored field for Western
film theory and history. As most of
Russia's production of animation for
cinema and
television was created during
Soviet times, it may also be referred to as the
History of Soviet animation.
Beginnings
]
The first animator in Russia was
Ladislas Starevich, who was of Polish descent and is therefore also known by the name of Wladyslaw Starewicz. Being a trained biologist, he started to make
animation with embalmed insects for educational purposes, but soon realized the possibilities of his medium to become one of the undisputed masters of
stop motion later in his life. His first few films, made in
1910, were
dark comedies on the family lives of cockroaches, and were so revolutionary that they earned Starevich a decoration from
the Tsar. Starevich's 41-minute
1913 film
The Night Before Christmas was the first example of the use of
stop motion and live action in the same scene.
After Starevich's emigration following the
October Revolution, animation in Russia came to a standstill for years. Only by the mid-to-late-
1920s could Soviet authorities be convinced to finance experimental studios. These were typically part of a bigger film studio and were in the beginning most often used to produce short animated clips for
propaganda purposes.
In doing so, these early pioneers could experiment with their equipment as well as with their
aesthetics. Creators like
Ivan Ivanov-Vano,
Mikhail Tsekhanovskiy or
Nikolay Khodatayev made their debut films in a very fresh and interesting way, aesthetically very different from American
animators. As Ivanov-Vano recalls in his mémoires,
Kadr za Kadrom (
Frame by Frame), this was partly because of the general atmosphere the
Russian avantgarde created around them and partly because they were able to experiment in small groups of enthusiasts.
Important films of this era include Ivanov-Vano's
On the skating rink (
1927), Tsekhanovskiy's
Post (
1929) and Khodataev's
The barrel organ (
1934).
Another remarkable figure of the time is
Aleksandr Ptushko. He was a trained
architect, but earlier in his life had worked in
mechanical engineering. In this field, he's known for the
invention of an adding machine that was in use in the
Soviet Union until the
1970s (an example of it can be seen in
Fyodor Khitruks first film as a director,
History of A Crime of 1962). When he joined the
puppet animation unit of
Mosfilm, he found an ideal environment to live out his mechanical ambitions as well as his artistic ones, and became internationally renowned with the Soviet Union's first
feature-length animated film,
The New Gulliver (
1935). This film mixes puppet animation and live acting. It rewrites
Jonathan Swift's novel to become more
communist, but does so with a didactic verbosity that makes it sometimes hard to bear. It nevertheless is a masterpiece of animation, featuring amazing mass scenes with hundreds of extras, very expressive mimics in close-ups, and innovative, very flexible camera work combined with excellent scenography. Ptushko became the first director of the newly founded
Soyuzdetmultfilm-Studio, but soon after left to devote himself to
live-action cinema. Still, even in his
feature films he showed a liking for
stop-motion special effects, for example in
Ilya Muromets (
1956).
Socialist Realism
In
1934,
Walt Disney sent a film reel with some shorts of
Mickey Mouse to the
Moscow Film Festival.
Fyodor Khitruk, then only an animator, recalls his impressions of that screening in an interview in
Otto Alder's film
The Spirit of Genius. He was absolutely overwhelmed by the liquidity of the films' images and enthusiastic about the new possibilities for animation that Disney's ways seemed to offer.
Higher officials shared this impression, too, and in
1935, the
Soyuzdetmultfilm-Studio was created from the small and relatively independent trickfilm units of
Mosfilm,
Sovkino and
Mezhrabpromfilm in order to focus on the creation of Disney-style animation, exclusively using
cel technique.
Already since
1932, when a congress of
Soviet writers had proclaimed the necessity of
Socialist realism, the influence of
Futurism and the
Russian avant-garde on animation had dwindled. Now, esthetic experiments were shoved off the agenda, and for over twenty years, Soyuzmultfilm, as the studio was called from
1936 onwards, worked in a
taylorised way, using
cel technique and
division of labour. It became the leading animation studio in the
Soviet union, producing an ever-growing number of children's and educational animation shorts and features, but the experimental spirit of the founding years was lost.
One of the most alarming examples of the transformation that not only the studios underwent, but also the artists were succumbed to, is
Mikhail Tsekhanovskiy. The
Leningrad-born artist made a name for himself in book illustration and graphics. He found
animation to be an ideal medium to transfer his style to and develop his artistic vision further. He became internationally renowned by his film
Post, shot in
1929 and earning him a number of prizes at international film festivals. With the establishment of
Socialist realism, he'd to abandon his innovative and highly convincing style for the then general practice that in Russia has come to be known as "Éclair": The filming of live action, followed by a frame-by-frame projection that had to serve the animators as their only source for the realization of movement (in the West, this is known as
rotoscoping). A striking example is the following comparison of two screenshots, taken from two of his films. The left one is taken from the unfinished
1934 film
The Tale of the Priest and His Servant Balda; the right one from
The Tale of Fisherman and Fish of
1950, both based on poems written by
Aleksandr Pushkin. The differences in visual decisions are clearly visible and characteristic for the transformation not only
Mikhail Tsekhanovskiy, but Soviet animation as a whole had to go through during that time.
Many artists didn't withstand these changes, though, and left the industry for other fields like painting or book illustrations. An example is the ingenious trio of
Yuriy Merkulov,
Zenon Kommissarenko and
Nikolay Khodataev, who after finishing their last film
The Barrel Organ (
1934) stopped working in animation.
For two decades, the studio confined itself to sober and to an extent tedious adaptations of folk tales and communist myths. An exception might only be found in wartime
propaganda spots, shot during
evacuation in
Samarkand 1941 -
1943, but their humour is arguably unintentional. Nevertheless, directors like the sisters
Zinaida and Valentina Brumberg with films like
Fedya Zaitsev (
1948), Ivan Ivanov-Vano with
1954's
Moydadyr (there is a first version from
1927, but it lacks the fluidity of the later version) or
Lev Atamanov with
The Snow Queen (
1957, told after
Hans Christian Andersen's tale) managed to create masterpieces of their genre that have been rewarded various prizes at festivals all over the world and have taken a lasting place in
animation history.
When
Khrushchev in
1956 proclaimed the end of the personality cult about
Stalin, he started a process of political and cultural renewal in the country. Even though animators still needed a while to free themselves from the long tradition of "Éclair", from the
1960s onwards, animation films gain completely new qualities.
The starting point for this was
Fyodor Khitruk's film
History of a Crime (
1962). Not only had he changed the animation style to something that resembled what the
UPA was doing, but for the first time since the
avantgarde years, he was able to tackle a contemporary story.
Khitruk's revolutionary approach paved the way for a vast number of young animation directors that in the following years developed their own distinctive styles and approaches. One of the most political was
Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, whose film
The Glass Harmonica (
1968) was severely cut by censors, but shelved nevertheless.
Anatoly Petrov is known as the founder of the cinema journal
Vesyolaya Karusel (
The Happy Merry-Go-Round, since
1969) that gave an opportunity to many young directors to make their first own films. Among them were
Leonid Nosyrev,
Valery Ugarov,
Eduard Nazarov,
Ivan Ufimcev and others.
The
1970s saw the birth of the Soviet Union's most popular animation series,
Nu, Pogodi! (
Just you wait!), directed by
Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin. These seemingly simple miniatures about a wolf chasing a hare through soviet-style
cartoon worlds owe a great deal of their popularity to the cunning
subtexts built into their parts.
During the
Stalin period,
puppet animation had come to a halt. Only in
1953 was a puppet division was refounded at
Soyuzmultfilm. Its first head of department was
Boris Degtyarev, under whose direction young animators tried to recover the knowledge that had been lost since the time of
Aleksandr Ptushko. Among the most outstanding of these young artists were
Vadim Kurchevskiy and
Nikolay Serebryakov, who worked together for their first films, for example
The Cloud in Love (
1963). Even when they decided to separate and make their own films, their style was marked by an extensive aesthetic search for, as Bendazzi puts it, "the combination of realism and the baroque", most clearly to be seen in
Not in the Hat is there Happiness (1968, by Serebrjakov) and especially in Kurchevskiy's masterpiece,
The Master of Clamecy (1972, after
Romain Rolland's novel
Colas Breugnon). One generation later,
Stanislav Sokolov started to make movies that brought the art of puppet animation to a new height. His approach, characterized by complex animation structures and multiple special effects can well be observed in
The Big Underground Ball (
1987, after
Andersen) or
Black and White Film (
1985), which won a prize in
Zagreb.
The most famous director of the time, and of Russian animation in general, is undoubtedly
Yuriy Norshteyn. His films
Little Hedgehog in the Fog (
1975) and
Tale of Tales (
1979) show not only technical masterliness, but also an unrivaled magic beauty content-wise.
Tale of Tales was elected best animation film of all time during the
1984 Olympic Arts Festival in
Los Angeles, and again in
2002.
Unfortunately, since the beginning of
Perestroika, Norshteyn hasn't found a possibility to finish his last film,
The Overcoat (clips:
(External Link
),
(External Link)).
Other directors were more able to cope with the changes that this time brought; they even commented on it in their films.
Garri Bardin's
Little Red Ridinghood et le Wolf (
1991) not only provoked by including a foreign language into the title, it also was full of allusions to the upcoming end of communism.
Aleksandr Tatarskiy even managed to found his own studio (
Pilot) in
1988, where he produced absurd films inspired by the Zagreb School. Yuriy Norshteyn and three other leading animators (
Fyodor Khitruk,
Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, and
Eduard Nazarov) founded a school and studio in
1993 which exists to this day, called
SHAR Studio.
Russian animation today
After the end of the
Soviet Union, the situation for
Russian animators changed dramatically. State subsidies diminished significantly on the one hand, and the number of
studios competing for that amount of money rose a good deal on the other. Most of the studios during the 1990s lived on animation for
advertisement and on doing commissioned works for big studios from
America and elsewhere. Nevertheless, there were a few very successful international co-productions, for example
Aleksandr Petrov's
Oscar-winning
The Old Man and the Sea (
1999, from
Ernest Hemingway's
novel) or
Stanislav Sokolov's (
1999, from
William Shakespeare's play) that earned the director an
Emmy.
Soyuzmultfilm, the former juggernaut of Russian animation studios (at one time employing as many as 400 animators and other staff), was beset by corrupt administrators who sold off all the rights to all the films previously made by the studio without telling shareholders or employees. Notably, in the mid-1990s
Sergei Skulyabin illegally took over the company and used hired thugs to keep the animators in line and the government officials from asserting legal authority. The legal director of Soyuzmultfilm kept a very low profile after having been beat up in an alley and forced to go to the hospital with injuries to the head, and during this period many documents were signed by Skulyabin illegally on behalf of Soyuzmultfilm.
Georgiy Borodin writes of this time, "artistic work at the studio became psychologically unbearable and impossible. No one had the guarantee that come morning, he wouldn't find his cabinet broken open, and his working table - cleared. Similar cases became almost a regular occurrence during the years of occupation. Animators who worked in other studios refused to believe the tales about the working conditions at the stolen "Soyuzmultfilm". Imagine, for example: you - the manager of one of the sections of the studio - come to your work cabinet and see in there several unidentified youths, engaged in packing away several large boxes with studio puppets to send them to an undisclosed location "at the command of Skulyabin". And when you, along with the director of the Puppet Dpt. (who is, by the way, responsible for the keeping of these puppets) keep them from being stolen by hiding them in a studio room which is inaccessible to these men, you're officially charged with attempted robbery." (
(External Link)) Skulyabin was eventually ousted and Soyuzmultfilm began a slow period of recovery.
(External Link)
As Russia's economic situation became increasingly stable, so did the market for animation, and during the last three years a number of feature-length animation films from Russian studios have emerged (for example
Melnitsa Animation Studio's
Little Longnose, 2003, from
Wilhelm Hauff's fairy tale, and
Solnechny Dom Studio's 2006
Prince Vladimir, based on early history of
Rus' - the highest-grossing Russian animated film to date). While the Russian animation community is yet far from reaching the splendor it possessed before the end of the Soviet Union, a significant recovery is being made and it's becoming more and more clear that the revived Russian animation industry will be very different from what it was in the late
1980s. According to
Andrei Dobrunov, head of Solnechny Dom, several Russian studios are currently working on some ten animated feature films.
(External Link)
Krakatuk, which will be released on August 23, 2007, will be Russia's first
CG-animated feature film.
(External Link) At the same time, Soyuzmultfilm has partnered up with
Mikhail Shemyakin and is working on
Gofmaniada, a puppet-animated feature film which is deliberately being made entirely without computers.
References to Russian animation
- The American cartoon series The Simpsons once featured an animation short named Worker and Parasite, referred to as "Eastern Europe's favorite cat and mouse team" — a parody of an unspecified type of Eastern European animation, perhaps inspired by the films of Estonian Priit Pärn (who developed his style in the 1980s), the beloved but ideologically enhanced, wolf-and-hare, Soviet cartoon "Nu, pogodi!" (Just You Wait!) or Gene Deitch's work on Tom and Jerry. Though the cartoon's title screen claims that it's from 1959, its style is extremely different from anything being made in the Soviet Union in that era.
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