History of Russian animation
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 its undisputed masters later in his life.
After his emigration following the October revolution, animation in Russia came to a standstill for years. Only by the late 1920s Soviet authorities could 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.
In doing so, these early pioneers could experiment with their equipment as well as with their esthetics. Creators like Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Mikhail Tsekhanovskij or Nikolaj Khodataev made their debut films in a very fresh and interesting way, esthetically very different from American animators. This was partly because of the general atmosphere the Russian avantgarde created around them, partly because they were able to experiment in small groups of enthusiasts, Ivanov-Vano recalls in his mémoires, Kadr za Kadrom (Frame by Frame).
Important films of this era include Ivanov-Vano's On the skating rink (1927), Tsekhanovskij'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 worked in mechanical engineering. In this field, he is 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 Fjodor Khitruks first film as a director, History of A Crime of 1962). When he joined the puppet animation unit of Mosfil'm, 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 full-length animation film, The New Gulliver of 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 regarding the 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 Sojuzdetmul'tfil'm-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, e.g. in Ilya Muromets of 1953.
Socialist Realism
In 1934, Walt Disney sent a film reel with some shorts of Mickey Mouse to the Moscow Film Festival. Fjodor 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 Sojuzdetmul'tfil'm-Studio was created from the small and relatively independent trickfilm units of Mosfil'm, Sovkino and Mezhrabpromfil'm 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 avantgarde on animation had dwindled. Now, esthetic experiments were shoved off the agenda, and for the next more than twenty years, Sojuzmul'tfil'm, as the studio was called from 1936 onwards, worked in a taylorised way, using cel technique and division of labour. Like this, it became the leading 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 for the transformation that not only the studios underwent, but also the artists were succumbed to, is Mikhail Tsekhanovskij. 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 had 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. 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, written by Aleksandr Pushkin, the right one from The Tale of Fisherman and Fish of 1950, a folk tale. The differences in visual decisions are clearly visible and characteristic for the transformation not only Mikhail Tsekhanovskij, but Soviet animation as a whole had to go through during that time.
Many artists did not withstand these changes, though, and left the industry for other fields like painting or book illustrations. An example is the ingenious trio of Jurij Merkulov, Zenon Kommissarenko and Nikolaj 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 Fedja Zaitsev (1948), Ivan Ivanov-Vano with Mojdadyr (1954; there is a first version of 1927, but it lacks the fluidity of the later version) or Lev Atamanov with The Snow Queen (1957, told after 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.
From Khrushchev Thaw to Perestroika
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 Fjodor Khitruks film History of a Crime of 1962. Not only that he changed the animation style to something that resembled what the UPA was doing, for the first time since the avantgarde years, he was able to tackle a contemporary story.
Khitruks 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 Andrej Khrzhanovskij, 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 Vesely 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 Nasarov, Ivan Ufimcev and others.
The 70s saw the birth of the Soviet Union's most popular animation series, Wolf and Hare, directed by Vjacheslav Kotjonochkin. 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, a puppet division was refounded at Soyuzmultfilm. Its first head of department was Boris Degtjarev, 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 Kurchevskij and Nikolaj Serebrjakov, who worked together for their first films, e.g. 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 Kurchevskij's masterpiece, The Master of Clamecy (1972, after Romain Roland'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 Jurij Norshtejn. His films Little Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) and Tale of Tales (1979) show not only technical masterliness, but also an unrivaled magic beauty as far as the content is concerned. Tale of Tales was elected best animation film of all times during the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, since the beginning of Perestroika, Norshtejn has not found a possibility to finish his last film, The Overcoat.
Other directors were more able to cope with the changes that this time brought, they even commented it in their films. Gari 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 Tatarskij even managed to found his own studio (Pilot) in 1988, where he produced absurd films inspired by the Zagreb School.
Russian animation today
Since the end of the Soviet Union, the situation for Russian animators has changed dramatically. State subsidiaries have diminished significantly on the one hand, and the number of studios competing for that amount of money has risen a good deal on the other. Most of the studios today live on animation for advertisement and on doing commissioned works for big studios from America and elsewhere. Nevertheless, there have been a few very successful international co-productions, e.g. Alexandr Petrov's Oscar-winning The Old Man and the Sea (2000, after Hemingway) or Stanislav Sokolov's The Winter's Tale (1999, after Shakespeare) that earned his director an Emmy. As Russia's economic situation is becoming increasingly stable, so is the market for animation, and during the last two years, a number of feature-length animation films from Russian studios have emerged (e.g. Ilya Maksimov's Dwarf Nose, 2003, after Andersen). While all of this points into the right direction, the Russian animation community is yet far from reaching the splendor it possessed before the end of the Soviet Union.
Russian animation in Western culture
- 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." It was a parody of Russian animation of the 1950s.
References
- Bendazzi, Giannalberto. 1994. Cartoons. One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. London/Bloomington: John Libbey/Indiana University Press.
- Giesen, Rolf. 2003. Lexikon des Trick- und Animationsfilms. Berlin: Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf.
- Leslie, Ester. 2002. Hollywood Flatlands. Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. London, New York: Verso.
- Pilling, Jayne (Ed.). 1997. A Reader in Animation Studies. London et al.: John Libbey.
- Асенин, Сергей Владимирович. 1986. Мир мультфильма. Москва: Искусство.
- Венжер, Наталья Яковлевна (Ed.). 1990. Сотворение фильма. Несколько интервью по служебным вопросам. Москва: Союз Кинематографистов СССР.
- Иванов-Вано, Иван Петрович. 1978. Кадр за кадром, Москва: Искусство.
- Орлов, Алексей Михайлович. 1995. Аниматограф и его анима: психогенные аспекты экранных технологий. Москва: Импето.
External links
- www.animator.ru Russian Animation Society's comprehensive database of Russian animation (in Russian).
- www.soyuzmultfilm.ru The most famous Russian animation studio's home page (in Russian).
- www.pilot-film.com Another famous studio's homepage (in Russian and English)