The End of Russian Animation?

Yuri Norshteyn offers a cutting observation on the state of modern Russian animation: “The country killed animation and left.”

This is not a pithy appraisal from an uninterested observer. Norshteyn is arguably Russia’s most famous director of animated films. He produced, among others, The Tale of Tales, which a 1984 international survey named “the best animated film of all times and nations.” His earlier classic, Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), received a similar moniker in 2003. And Norshteyn is influential: Japanese Director Hayao Miyazaki, for example, maintains that he decided to become an animator after seeing Hedgehog in the Fog. And yet, even Norshteyn cannot access the funding needed to bring his work to the screen. He has been working on The Overcoat, based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol, for more than 20 years.

Apparently, now is not the best time for creating masterpieces in Russian animation.

Industry professionals have deemed the present state of Russian animation a “catastrophe” and say that if immediate measures aren’t taken, the country will not have any homegrown cartoons. Ordinary Russian parents have already come to terms with the fact that they must raise their children on either the old “Soviet” cartoons that they watched during their own childhoods or on the foreign cartoons now shown on television. It is a sad commentary that modern Russian children know The Simpsons, Shrek, or heroes of Japanese anime better than their own national characters.

So why, exactly, has Russian animation, with its rich history, great masters, and strong traditions, decayed so drastically? This is an easier question to ask than to answer.

Ogres and Stag Beetles

In early 2010, Russian animators wrote an open letter to President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, which began: “The community of Russian animators was shocked by the news which appears to be a death sentence for national animation.” The news in question was the government’s decision to enact a new set of rules on how federal government subsidies were to be allocated to support cinematography in 2010. The result would mean decidedly less funding for “marginal assets,” like animation and documentaries.

“The Ministry of Culture, which up to this point had financed all cinema, has lost a huge piece of the budget,” said Alexander Gerasimov. “But it still has to somehow provide for what is viewed as ‘marginal assets’ – like animation, documentaries, debuts, independent films – in a word, those [projects] where there’s a lot of bother and little money… According to a rough estimate by a few specialists, animated cartoons could end up with about a half of last year’s financing. Some studios may have to close.”

Gerasimov is producer and director of the Open Russian Animation Festival, which takes place each year in Suzdal. Professionals and cinephiles gather to view all the new cartoons made during the past year. And at recent festivals, Gerasimov says, there’s been an increasing sense of anxiety, as attendees wonder if the festival will even be held the following year. The state allotments for all Russian animation in 2010 is reportedly less than the budget for the most recent Shrek movie.

In order to understand why Russian national cinema, and, especially, animation, is so dependent on government support in Russia, we have to look at history.

Animation appeared in Russia almost exactly a century ago. In 1910, Vladislav Starevich, a Russian entomologist who was fascinated by photography and film (then seen to be little more than hobbies), decided to make a documentary about stag beetles. The central scene of the informational nature film was a battle between two male stag beetles for the female. However, when the beetles were placed under the bright lights needed to capture their battle on film, they became passive. Starevich devised a brilliant solution: he made models out of their shells and shot the necessary footage frame by frame. It was Russia’s first stop-animation film.*

In 1912, Starevich took his work one step further and created the short film, The Beautiful Leukanida or The Battle of the Capricorn and Stag Beetles. In it, stop-action insects performed a parody of a knight’s tale. The film was wildly successful with both Russian and foreign audiences. Many believed they were witnessing a miracle of animal training.

After the Revolution, Starevich emigrated and continued his work in France. Many of the “titans” of Russian cinema followed. As a result, there wasn’t much happening in animation within the USSR until the middle of the 1930s, although, naturally, there were singular successes. In fact it is noteworthy that, in the aftermath of revolution and civil war, when there was nothing to eat, there were cartoons in the USSR.

In 1936, the largest studio in Europe, Soyuzmultfilm, was formed as socialism’s answer to the Walt Disney Studios (founded in 1923). It is said that Josef Stalin personally insisted on the creation of the world’s best cartoon studio; he clearly understood the value of cartoons as an instrument of propaganda. The Soviet government gave Soyuzmultfilm several Russian Orthodox churches for studios,* and, in 1936, just as the worst of the purges were getting underway, Soyuzmultfilm released its first animated film: It’s Hot in Africa.

In the years that followed, Soyuzmultfilm was transformed into a dream factory for children. In its best years, the studio employed as many as 600 people and released some 40 hours of animation. Although the majority of its output was bald propaganda or didactic productions (and in the early years Disney clones), there were also important breakthroughs and brilliant masterpieces.

Certainly Soyuzmultfilm’s heyday was in the 1960s and 1970s, when luminaries like Fyodor Khitruk, Yuri Norshteyn, Eduard Nazarov, and Andrei Khrzhanovsky worked in the studio. These masters led the way in defining Soviet animation’s special visual, philosophical and conceptual qualities – those things that distinguished it from all other animation in the world.

By the end of the 1980s, however, Soyuzmultfilm began to have serious financial and staffing problems; the best professionals were leaving in droves. By the early 1990s, the studio had fallen apart. The largest studio in Europe was replaced by Filmofond, a commercial organization that controlled the copyrights on Soyuzmultfilm’s colossal archive. Since then, most of the news related to Soyuzmultfilm has been about copyright spats and lawsuits, rather than new releases.

“Soyuzmultfilm was gone, and Filmofond took over all the space of the Soyuzmultfilm studio,” says director Eduard Nazarov. “They don’t make movies there, they just make money somewhere for themselves, I suppose. They even destroyed the best recording stage in Europe. It was in an old church with meter-and-a-half thick walls. You’ve never heard such perfect silence. Now it’s the office for the director of the fund.

“It was an institute, a technical school, and a workplace. Now there’s nothing. It’s a kind of revolutionary idiocy. But where does it come from when there is no revolution?” Nazarov, author of such classics as There Once Was a Dog, Journey of an Ant, and The Hunt, worked in the studio for more than 40 years.

Animation specialist Georgy Borodin believes the collapse of Soyuzmultfilm was a loss of global proportions. “It was Soyuzmultfilm that shaped the cultural environment where all Soviet children grew up,” Borodin said. “That environment nurtured our national identity in animation. That environment and that identity are now gone, and that’s tragic for animation artists and viewers alike. The loss of Soyuzmultfilm for them and for me was the loss of our cultural homeland, no less a catastrophe than the fall of the Soviet Union is to Putin. And, therefore, for me the key – and yet unanswered – question of our history is: ‘Could Soyuzmultfilm have survived in the new economic conditions?’ It’s like that question the first-wave emigrants asked themselves: ‘What would have happened to Russia if the Bolsheviks had never existed?’ There is no easy answer.”

Between a Mountain and a Hard Place

When the history of government-sponsored Soviet animation ended in the 1990s, and the spaceship Soyuzmultfilm fell to Earth, it buried a wealth of Soviet cultural treasures. Russian animation found itself in the delicate position of a noblewoman after the 1917 Bolshevik takeover. Highly educated, refined, possessing a perfect bloodline and meticulous manners, she suddenly had to work to earn her daily bread. It is a hard adjustment for someone who had not wanted for anything since childhood.

And so, much like the nobility after the Revolution, in the 1990s many animators emigrated. Others found other jobs. Norshteyn set aside his Overcoat and earned a living making television commercials.

Amazingly however, Russian animation survived. Little by little, new studios appeared, along with a new job title: Producer. A new generation of remarkable animators arose: Ivan Maximov, Alexander Petrov, Konstantin Bronzit, Mikhail Aldashin, all of whose work continually garners substantial acclaim at the world’s most prestigious film festivals. More or less successful television series have appeared. Truth be told, however, the only truly successful one is Smeshariki, on which the American show Go Go Riki was based.

But just as animation was standing up on its own two feet, the financial crisis hit. After 2008, most studios stopped working. A few say that when the new government funding deal goes into effect next year, it will spell the end of what had been restored of the animation industry.

In their letter to Putin and Medvedev, Russian animators wrote: “The most awful thing is that national animation had survived its death throes of more than 15 years ago. Many unique specialists left the profession, ties broke down, studios closed. Only with the financial help of the government was the animation community able to put the pieces back together, so that today it is once again possible to say that Russia has an animation industry. If the wheels we have so painstakingly set in motion again stop spinning, the chances of a resurgence of animation in the coming years will be practically zero. We will once again be set back decades behind the rest of the world in the art of animation.”

In short: the Soviet system was destroyed and, just as a new, market-based system was maturing, the market imploded.

Animators argue that the most dangerous aspect of the new system of distributing government resources is its complete lack of transparency. No one can understand who gets funding and why.

The most telling recent example is the inexplicable shuttering of the series Gem Mountain, based on Russian folk tales, launched in 2005 at Pilot Studios, Russia’s first independent animation company, which was founded in 1986. For a decade, the studio was a sensation in post-Soviet animation. It attracted all the best animators, and they repeatedly won prizes at high-profile international festivals. Eduard Nazarov, creative director of Gem Mountain, recalls: “Goskino, the Cabinet, the government and the parliament all effusively praised the idea [of Gem Mountain]: ‘this is great, pure patriotism,’ they said. Everyone pledged their full support and a separate budget for the ‘best animation film of all time.’ And now, all of a sudden, it’s nothing.”

“The sad truth is that, in the past couple of decades, Russian animation has lived and thrived mostly on government money,” says Sergei Merinov, a Pilot Studios director who employs a proprietary modeling clay technique and wrote some of the episodes and intros for Gem Mountain. “Even commercial projects can only be launched if the government provides start-up capital. I’m not even talking about independent film or student projects, which should always be sponsored by the government, like they are all over the world. That is, if the government cares at all about film production in the country.”

So what about private money? After all, most successful animation in the West is produced by private animation studios. And there’s the rub: Russian law does not allow commercial interruption of children’s television programming. This makes it hard for an entrepreneur to make a return on an animation investment, and this is why so few cartoons are now shown on Russian television. Those that are aired are imported cartoons bought in cheap package deals that include other shows and series.

Good animation is expensive. And no one buys expensive, locally made animation. Despite the fact that many episodes of Gem Mountain have won prizes at international film festivals, it is shown only when TV channels can afford to run commercial free programs: at 6 a.m. on Sundays. And forget about ever seeing the magnificent Lullabies of the World, which has scooped up all the top Russian cinematography prizes since 2006.

“Animation can be commercially successful if you make feature length films with a good story, and if you know how to make your films make sense to international audiences. It’s even better to make them in 3D,” says Arsen Gotlib, producer and CEO of Metronome Film Studios. Gotlib made the Lullabies of the World series and a few other amazing cartoons that Russian children have never seen. “But making a feature length animated film is hard work; it’s much more technologically demanding than a regular movie.

“It’s well known that commercials aren’t allowed during children’s programming on television,” Gotlib continues. “This is hampering the development of children’s cinematography. There’s not enough money or professionals… especially animation cartoonists. Our market does not have sufficient animation cartoonists to meet 10% of the demand. There is a colossal need for them, and it will only grow. But whenever there is a slack in the animation industry, they immediately leave to go into advertising, where they can make good money. It’s impossible for them to return.”

Other professionals agree. “The saddest thing is the departure of amazing specialists to other areas,” says Alexander Gerasimov. “They go into industrial design, computer graphics, advertising, anything where the money is good. It will be very extremely difficult to lure these people back.”

Alexander Petrov, the Yaroslavl animator who won an Academy Award for his film The Old Man and the Sea, now makes commercials for Chinese instant noodles. Pilot Studios has no ongoing projects. All the best Russian cartoon directors, many of whom are better known outside Russia than within, are out of work.

{An aside: Pilot Studios was one of the last to maintain its offices in a church in Moscow’s central neighborhood, even after the state gave the Church of Three Saints on Kulishki back to the Orthodox Church. The priest serving in the church turned out to be an old friend of Pilot head Alexander Tatarsky: the two had attended film school together. In the end, Pilot was compensated with a nice space down the street from the church. Later, this space was reputedly eyed by Yevgeny Chichvarkin, of the Evroset mobile phone empire, who wanted it for their employee training center, and the studio was forced to move again. “Now when I pass by the street, I see Evroset people through the window singing corporate anthems in unison,” says Pilot’s claymation studio head Sergei Merinov.}

As if all that is not enough, Russian animation faces another huge problem: Russians may grow accustomed to its absence. The art form has no outlet to reach its audience. When average Russians don’t see Russian-made cartoons on television or on the big screen, they conclude that Soviet or Russian animation ended with the Soviet Union.

“I recall that, back around 1980, The Tale of Tales played in Moscow movie theaters for 14 months. That would be unthinkable today,” said Yuri Norshteyn. “I went to America for a month not long ago. I traveled around the country. There were many meetings, screenings… I was impressed by how Americans really pay attention. I have to say that Americans are a better audience than Russians. We’ve forgotten how to watch a film. If our leaders think that cartoons are a luxury – or that a child can live without emotional growth and become a normal human being – they are sadly mistaken,” Norshteyn warns. “And they shouldn’t be surprised when these children grow up to be people with cold eyes who look at everything as a means of profit, an object to use to their advantage.”

Putin and Medvedev have yet to reply to the animation community. RL

* The world’s first stop-motion film was The Humpty Dumpty Circus (1898), made by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton. In it, a toy circus of acrobats and animals comes to life.

* Some of these were returned to the Orthodox church after perestroika, but the fight for others continues to this day.

VIEW TOONS: Many of the cartoons mentioned in this article are available, at least in part, for online viewing. Visit russianlife.com and follow the links from this issue.