Moving Pictures

The Little-Known History of Russian Animation

The masters of Russian and Soviet animation rank among the world’s greatest artists of the genre. But not many outside the industry know their names or have ever seen their work. 

The art of animation is almost 100 years old, and Russian animation is as old as animation itself. Wladislaw Starewicz, one of the first, and greatest, animators, was Russian. By 1912 he was making amazing films with insect-dolls — parodies of movies of that era. Stop-motion animation and trick cinematography both owe much to Starewicz, who fled revolution-devastated Russia for France in 1919. 

There, in France, was another acclaimed Russian animator — the great Alexandre Alexeieff, who would later invent the “pinscreen.” This was a screen stuck through with thousands of retractable pins, which allowed the fluid creation of any shape, to cast shadows with different angles of lighting. The resulting image could then be photographed and animated. Alexeieff’s phantasmagoric pinscreen film, Night on Bald Mountain, set to Mussorgsky’s music, is still considered by many to be an unequalled masterpiece of animation. 

But this was much later, in 1933, and in France. As for Russian animation, it did not start truly developing until some fifteen years after Starewicz’s first films.

The first Soviet animators were inspired by the vigor, passion for experimentation, and pursuit of the form that characterized the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, be it in fine art, poetry, or theater. Significantly, the first Soviet animated films — Soviet Toys and Humoresques — were made by the great filmmaker Dziga Vertov.

Some of the other young, avant-garde artists who set Soviet animation in motion were Nikolai Khodataev, Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, the sisters Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg and Ivan Ivanov-Vano. No matter what they filmed — short commercials for motion pictures, propaganda pieces, political caricatures, or entertainment for children — they were first and foremost searching for a new form, creating new art in accordance with the new aesthetics. One of the greatest extant films of that time, Mikhail Tsekhavovsky’s The Post (1929), conveys, through its laconic graphics and impetuous editing, the energy of its era, its constructivist purity and style. 

In 1935, Alexander Ptushko made The New Gulliver, the first full-length, Soviet animated film with sound. His film combined a live actor with puppets (portraying Lilliputians). The success of Gulliver in Russia and abroad was so great that it became clear that it was time for Russia to launch its own large-scale animation studio. Walt Disney Studios had been founded in 1923 (Mickey Mouse appeared in 1928; Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first full-length American animated film, was released in 1937). So, in 1935, Soyuzmultfilm — created in the likeness of Disney Studios — was launched. Soviet animators, who had previously worked independently, were brought together in Moscow, at the new studios. 

State-of-the-art technology offered directors and artists new skills and techniques. But their awe of the “perfect” Disney films was so great that, beginning in the middle of the 1930s, Russian animation largely mimicked Disney productions. Of course, Russian cartoons had their own masters and their own themes, but the promise of shining originality from the 1920s was lost. What is more, by the end of the 1930s, avant-garde and all other art forms save Socialist Realism had been stifled — Stalin’s attack on formalism left behind not a single living thing. 

The Disney style survived in Soviet animation through the Second World War, and was brought to perfection in numerous retellings of fairy tales (early Soviet animation was almost exclusively targeted at children, with the exception of revolutionary and war propaganda). The technology adopted from Disney, where multiple drawings mirrored the movements of real actors, was especially popular. Characters thus moved just as if they were alive, to the delight of the viewers. But this, of course, was a dead-end for the art form. 

It should be noted that, beginning in the 1930s, the nation’s top actors, scriptwriters and composers were all working in animation. This was the result of the pressures of censorship. Many talented artists, especially writers, were denied the right to publish. So, in order to survive, they escaped to artistic regions less prone to censorship: children’s art, variety shows or translation. Needless to say, this contributed considerably to the development of these traditionally marginalized genres. 

At the end of 1940s, at the time of Stalin’s attack on “cosmopolitanism,” the Disney style, which had enjoyed a long reign of authority through the 1930s, was categorized as “cringing before the West.” But no political campaign could free Soviet animation of the Disney influence, under which a whole generation of artists and directors had worked. 

By the end of the 1950s, Soviet animation had reached the end of an era. It had its great masters, but they were largely unknown — unlike cinema, animation was seen to be an anonymous art. The films were moralistic and sluggish, but invariably good-humored and free of aggression, if a bit old-fashioned and imitative. The revolution in Soviet animation, however, was just around the corner. It occurred at the same time as in other realms of Soviet art, during the Thaw that accompanied Khrushchev’s ascension. The era of star animators, who became known to everyone in the Soviet Union, began. 

Animation was no longer anonymous.

The Golden Age: 

Russian-Soviet Animation of the 1960-80s

The turning point in the revolution was the film, The Story of One Crime (1962), by Fyodor Khitruk, who had been working for 25 years as an artist-animator. The story is an investigation into the motives of a placid accountant who kills a female janitor for yelling near his apartment window all morning. 

A day in the life of the accountant Vasily Vasilievich Mamin is shown as a series of intimidations. This lonely, balding, gentle little man dreams only of peace and tranquility, but he is continually assaulted by the rattles and shouts of his churlish neighbors.

The film uses conditionality previously unthinkable. The frame contains only the necessary; there are no superfluous details, which makes the images especially expressive. For example, Mamin’s room consists simply of a chair and a television set against a blue background; there are no walls, no floor, no other objects. And this conditional approach easily mixes with a hyper-reality: the television screen shows real movies; the neighbor’s room, which constantly blares music, is furnished only with a black and white photo of a stereo system, like a children’s application on a colored background. The radio emits real voices, while the characters in the film have conversations in music: the trumpeting bass of the neighbor is counterposed to the thin little sounds of Mamin’s plaintive replies. 

The film is also filled with irony. Behind the windows of the office where Vasily Vasilievich works, a house is being built. The crane hoists into place wall panels which already contain flowers on the window-sills and baby-carriages on the balconies. When the roof of the building is installed, it already has an advertisement inscribed on it: “Keep your money in the Savings Bank!” But despite the irony, the film evokes great empathy for Mamin, which was as new for Soviet animation as was the character of Mamin. After the optimistic pioneers, after the pathetic or cunning, but invariably victorious, fairy-tale characters, gentle, lonesome and feeble Mamin seemed to have emerged directly from classic Russian literature. Khitruk all at once pushed Russian animation beyond the bounds of colorful entertainment for children, beyond the boundaries of Disney mimicry. 

Each of Khitruk’s films was different, each offered a new discovery. It is therefore no wonder many call him the “father” of Soviet animation. In Topotyzhka, his children’s film about a bear cub, his animals are fuzzy, not limited by a rigid outline. This was new and gave the drawings a special, sweet warmth.

Khitruk immediately became famous and was showered with international prizes for his work. The hilarious Film, Film, Film! showed the stages of filmmaking, starting with the script-writer’s inspiration. In the sarcastic Man in Frame, an ornate portrait frame gets thicker, squeezing the face inside, each time the careerist bureaucrat, who keeps himself “in a frame,” gets promoted. Another film tells how a sympathetic, ingenuous Ikarus was destroyed by “wise men.” His anti-utopian Island won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1974. It tells the story of a little man who cannot escape from a tiny, uninhabited island. 

Yet, to this day, Russian audiences love Khitruk most for his stylish Boniface’s Holidays — the tale of a circus lion who traveled to Africa to stay with his grandmother, but never has time for fishing, because local youth are always asking him to show them circus tricks. And, of course, for his three films about Winnie the Pooh, a more pensive, philosophical bear (voice provided by the famous actor Yevgeny Leonov) than the Walt Disney creation. It is a wonder both bears stem from the same E. E. Milne books. 

Indeed, the most beloved, important characters in Russian animated films (all date from the new, post-Khitruk era) are not like the famous go-getter characters of world animation. They are more dreamy and meditative, as if drawn from classic Russian literature. And even the characters of chase cartoons (like Tom & Jerry or the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote) still possess Russian overtones. That is why positive characters, such as the hare eternally chased by the wolf in Nu, pogodi (You just wait) or the cat Leopold, victimized by obnoxious mice, are gullible slackers who win by luck, not skill. The favorite kids’ series 38 Parrots, about the lives of four jungle friends — a parrot, a monkey, an elephant and a boa — is not about pranks and adventures, as in similar Western cartoons, but about funny, paradoxical debates and discussions.

Among other animated characters, distinguished by their sad pensiveness, are those in Roman Kachanov’s puppet films. In Mitten, a little girl wants to have a dog so badly, that, in her dreams her mitten turns into a puppy. And, of course, there is Cheburashka, who has recently topped the charts of things cute in Japan. This floppy-eared, lonely and doleful creature goes through life dreaming that everything around him will be his friend. It is significant that, in Eduard Uspensky’s book on which the cartoon is based, Cheburashka did not look nearly so touchingly pitiful as in Kachanov’s animated series. 

The revolution begun by Fyodor Khitruk was supported by the young — those who were in their twenties during Khrushchev’s Thaw. They would later be called shestidesyatniks (the sixties generation). Andrei Khrjanovsky made his debut as a director in 1966, at the age of 27. Of this brilliant generation of animators, he is a leading light. His aesthetic pursuit is in line with the discoveries of non-conformist art of that era, with its protests, metaphors, ironic pathos and an attempt to recover lost connections with world art. Khrjanovsky’s first films were parables. The sarcastic There Lived Kozyavin told of a bureaucrat, who, ordered by his seniors to find a certain Sidorov, walked forward, like a robot, in the direction pointed out by his boss, through towns, deserts and seas. Indifferently, he broke down walls and mountains, destroying and trampling everything on his way, until, having walked round the world, he came back to his office only to report that Sidorov was not to be found anywhere. It is said that, after the film was shown, Soviet physicists started calling direct, uniform motion “the Kozyavin effect.” 

The association of the obtuse destroyer Kozyavin with the state machine was so obvious that people wondered how such a film could have slid by the censors. Well, the censors noticed Khrjanovsky’s second film, A Glass Harmonica, and shelved it for 20 years. The film is an allegory of the destiny of art. Under the magical spell of the harmonica, ugly mugs in paintings by Bosch, Bruegel, Archimboldo and Goya turn into refined faces. But the “bourgeois” authorities want the public to worship money and so kill the musician. Yet a few years later, a new musician arrives, and the repression ends differently. 

In the 1970 and 1980s, Khrjanovsky made a series of films based on Alexander Pushkin’s drawings and manuscripts. The cursive writing of Pushkin’s manuscript became the dramatic base of the film: letters twined into landscapes and silhouettes. Pushkin’s casual drawings on the margins of his manuscripts danced the mazurka, started arguments and schemed intrigues. The voice off-screen recited Pushkin’s poems and letters, while the poet himself, so mercurial in his self-portraits, drifted about the film amidst drawn and real landscapes, antique etchings and Petersburg sculptures — lightheaded here and sad over there. The director’s ironic, tender and lively attitude towards the iconographic poet broke through the thick crust of Pushkin studies with a breath of fresh air. 

Yuri Norshtein, who is now referred to as “one of the greatest,” was an artist-animator for many years before he became a director. His name appears in many film credits, both drawn and stop-action, beginning in 1962. He took part in creating Boniface’s Holidays, Mitten, the Cheburashka cartoons and 38 Parrots. Norshtein was one of the best animators in Khrjanovsky’s Pushkin series and Khrjanovsky even said that he wrote the script specifically for Norshtein, just as film scripts are written for famous actors.

While in animation elsewhere, every animator usually has a quite narrow field of expertise, this is not the case with Russian animation. There are no rabbit and squirrel specialists. Everyone must be
multi-faceted. Every director works as an artist for other directors, who have totally different manners and tastes, in between the shoots of his own films. This gives Russian animators greater flexibility and more varied skills. Russian animation is also very “handmade” — unusual techniques and textures are discovered overcoming technical difficulties. The result, which cannot be recreated on the state-of-the art equipment, often bewilders animators at international festivals.

Norshtein is an animator who made things “by hand,” creating the very complicated “multi-plane” technique. At the shooting stage, this technique turns each image of Norshtein’s films into a conjunction of the tiniest elements, where each part, literally every eye, lip or finger, moves separately. As a result, the character of the film, while he does not look real (rather: grotesque, funny, irregular, imperfect), really lives and breathes.

But the viewer cares little for technology. Of much greater importance is Norshtein’s special genre of poetic animation: it is pure lyrics, revealed through a series of visual images. Here, sudden associations, reminiscences, fears and dreams are more important than the unfolding of the actual plot. 

Norshtein has made just six films. The most famous are his last two: Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) and Tale of Tales (1979). And, of course, The Overcoat, based on Gogol’s novel of the same name. The Overcoat became a legend soon after work on it began (it is still being shot, having begun over 15 years ago). In 1984, Tale of Tales was named by the international jury at the Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, “the best animated film of all time.” When, in 2003, the same survey of experts was conducted in Tokyo, Norshtein’s Hedgehog in the Fog was voted the world’s best film. Tale of Tales took second prize; Disney’s Fantasia came third. 

Hedgehog in the Fog is a short tale of a little hedgehog who is walking to his little bear-friend’s place to count the stars. But he gets lost in the early evening fog. It is a story of the fantasies and fears of a pensive, dreamy child. Before the frightened hedgehog, the fog knits itself into an owl, a curious dog or a beautiful white horse. Every sound that sweeps by is a threatening horror, every tree he bumps into an elephant’s leg. The immense world condenses around the little hedgehog like white milk, swallowing everything familiar. At the end, having reached his little bear-friend, the little hedgehog sits, quiet and taciturn, shaken by his dreadful and magical adventure. 

Tale of Tales is a thirty-minute memoir. The script of this frenetic stream of the unconscious — parables about a poet, merged with childhood impressions and dreams — was written by contemporary writer Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. The character of the film is a little wolf with sorrowful eyes, the wolf from the Russian lullaby: “the grey little wolf will come and bite your little side.” The wolf steals a shining manuscript from a poet’s table and runs with it to the woods, as the song has it, where it turns out to be not a roll of paper, but a bundle with a crying baby. 

Here, near an abandoned old house, with closed shutters and creaky floors, it is rainy autumn and cars roar by. Huge green apples fall from trees into the snow and a rosy-cheeked boy sits atop the tree, feeding his apple to two crows. On the head of a father, walking proudly home, suddenly grows Napoleon’s cocked hat. In the depth of the abandoned house, the little wolf opens the door into childhood, as if into the blazing summer: there, a girl is skipping a rope with a good-natured, Picasso-esque ox; a giant fish is swimming in the skies; a woman, busy with her household chores, waits for her husband; and the poet, in a fit of inspiration, plays the lyre. A tablecloth ripples to the sound of a departing train, like an autumn leaf. 

Amidst the constant flow of reminiscences, one of the most touching is war as seen through the eyes of a child (Norshtein was born the year WWII broke out). In a dance pavilion, under the dim light of just one lamp, couples are dancing the famous tango, “The Weary Sun.” With every cough of the skipping record, a man disappears from a pair. To the sound of the departing train, a line of soldiers dressed in overcoats marches through the rows of women, now embracing the emptiness. Then letters of notification fly in: “your son …”, “your husband …”, “your brother …” and the tango plays again, but few of the women get their men back. There is more dancing with the emptiness, and the accordionist, who returns from the war, has just one leg. A piece of rye bread on a saucer, and a salutory glass of vodka, symbolize those who do not return when the war is over. As animation researcher Mikhail Gurevich suggests, the closest lyrical analogue to Tale of Tales is the film Mirror, by Andrei Tarkovsky, filmed at the same time by a man with a similar range of associations and memories.

With his six films, Norshtein has radically changed the status of animation — not only in Russia, but throughout the world. It ceased to be a marginal art form. 

Born in 1941, the same year as Norshtein, Garry Bardin made his most important animated films in the 1980s. He started making films using material like matches, pieces of rope, wire, or paper. In one of his best films — the antiwar Conflict — it is matches that act. Their green and blue heads look like soldiers’ helmets, a chopped-off chip is “shouldered” like a gun, and “soldiers” of two conflicting sides patrol the border. Matches turn into horses, and cavalry gallops to meet the enemy. Boxes full of “soldiers” roar like trucks, crawl like tanks, fly like planes. Of course, in the climax, all of this simultaneously bursts into flames, leaving behind only a field, studded with gnarled black remains of the incendiary armies. 

Bardin is given to pathos and sentimentalism, but his materials imply irony, and the darkness of his early parables is not overdone. In Banquet, only the objects move. Invisible guests have arrived at a banquet: dishes move, food disappears, laughter is heard, but there are no people present. Bardin clearly prefers action without words. There is only music and interjections, which are so expressive in their intonation that words would be redundant. Marriage uses ropes. This film about love and family life unfolds among ropes, whose knots serve as heads, and their crushed tails as hair. With every conflict in the family, one of the threads that make up the rope gets torn, while peacemaking fastens the shreds with scotch-tape and pins. 

Eduard Nazarov is yet another acclaimed animator of the same age as Bardin and Norshtein. Nazarov is first and foremost an artist, one of Russia’s most famous artist-animators. He worked often with Khitruk, and was the creator of the Winnie the Pooh image. As a director, Nazarov has not made many films, but one of them, There Lived a Dog, became a huge hit in Russia, with phrases from its script entering everyday language. The story is based on a well-known fairy-tale in which an old dog is turned out of the house to die, so an old wolf stages the kidnapping of a baby to help the dog gain his masters’ favor again and be allowed back home. Nazarov animates the tale with such humor and tenderness, with such rich Ukrainian colors, that it immediately made Nazarov one of Russia’s most respected directors. (The film was made at Soyuzmultfilm studios in Ukraine. In fact, to single out Russian animation from the Soviet would be artificial. While each Soviet republic had its own studios, they influenced each other greatly.)

Alexander Tatarsky, while ten years younger than the famous directors who determined the post-Thaw ascent of Russian animation, is still attributed to the Soviet period and considered one of its last masters. The generation after Tatarsky grew up and earned its recognition during the post-Soviet epoch, when Soyuzmultfilm had already gone to pieces and animators had to survive, as they say, “on grass.” 

At the start of his career, Tatarsky worked with artist and director Igor Kovalev, who emigrated in the 1990s and has by now become one of the most successful professionals in Hollywood and a cult figure at international animation festivals. Tatarsky made his most renowned films in the early 1980s, in the plasticine technique unusual for Russia. His Plasticine Crow, Last Year’s Snow Fell, and the hand-drawn Other Side of the Moon, gravitate towards the absurd, a notion practically absent from Russian animation prior to Tatarsky. 

What amazed the audience about Plasticine Cow, having been raised on the circumstantiality of Soviet cartoons, was the impetuous rhythm and rich visuals. It seems that the eye cannot follow the transformations of one image into the other (the same thing that would later frighten the older generation in music videos). The film is based on hectically composed children’s verses — the narrator tells the story, getting confused all the time, correcting himself and changing characters and sometimes even the whole plot: “As we remember, crow, or maybe dog, or cow, once had a bit of luck. Someone had sent her cheese. Two hundred grams or so. Three hundred, as it may be. Or, maybe, half a kilo.” The characters — clumsy and ridiculous — are molded of plasticine as the story progresses, and, having almost shaped into something, rush to turn into something completely different. A leaf turns into a piece of cheese, the cheese turns into a cow, the cow, still incomplete, becomes a hippopotamus. And the story keeps galloping on.

In 1988, on the eve of the collapse of the USSR, Tatarsky created the first non-state studios, Pilot, which contributed a great deal to the later development of Russian animation. It was here that many future directors and artists — the generation that is active now — studied and worked as interns.

The New Generation:

Animators Post-Sovieticus

Just as it is difficult to talk about Soviet animation without taking into account the influence of the former republics, it is impossible to describe post-Soviet animation with respect to merely the two capitals — Moscow and Petersburg. The Sverdlovsk (today Yekaterinburg) school in the Urals was among of the most original and strong in all of Russia, and this is where one of the country’s most creative and prolific personalities in animation — Alexander Petrov — got his start. His films, The Cow, based on a story by writer Andrei Platonov, and The Mermaid, were both nominated for Oscars, while his colorful IMAX film, The Old Man and the Sea, received the Oscar for best animated film in 2000.

Petrov uses the rare technique of ‘glass painting,’ a method created by the artist himself — drawing without brushes, but with his own fingers, then shooting the painting and making the next shot after manipulating the still wet drawing. It makes Petrov an artist and director in one. 

Petrov’s films are lyrical and unhurried. They gravitate towards sadness and pathos, rather than irony — a trend unusual for Russian animation. Petrov’s technique creates astoundingly beautiful iridescent images, sometimes giving an impression that his animated films are location shootings, a fact criticized by some experts as a departure from art. 

The same age as Petrov, Ivan Maximov is also a one-man scriptwriter, animator and director. Maximov is a graphic artist and his cartoons, where funny and touching creatures of his imagination lead their strange lives, are mostly monochromatic. Usually, movement and development in Maximov’s films are determined by music. No wonder his best films are named after musical pieces — Ravel’s “Bolero” (someone resembling a little dinosaur walks a looped labyrinth) and Brubeck’s “5/4” (a nonsensical and preoccupied movement of freaks). Maximov is incredibly resourceful, his films are stuffed with gags, as hilariously absurd as his animation as a whole. But despite the tricks, Maximov’s films are purely lyrical, no less sentimental than they are funny.

Another forty-five year old leader of today’s animation, Mikhail Aldashin, is a master of amusing, light films, which have received many awards at international festivals. One of his films, the lyrical and tender Nativity, stands out as one of the best examples of Russian animation of the last decade. Nativity resembles primitive art. Its tone is the childlike and popular faith, which, by assimilating something, also appropriates, domesticates it, draws it closer and humbles even the most elevated subject. Aldashin’s interpretation of the Annunciation, the trip to Bethlehem, Christmas and of the Gift of the Magis wins you over with the warmth of its ingenuous details. To the music of Bach and Beethhoven, a sturdy, clumsy Joseph repairs the roof, worries behind the door while his wife is in labor and freezes in affection upon seeing Mary and their son. Common-looking young Mary is bustling and serious: here she is testing the water with her elbow (is it warm enough for the baby’s bath), there she is hushing the angel choir (least they should wake up the baby). Before the angel arrives with news of the birth of Jesus, the three magi sleep in one bed, like peasants, and, before they depart on their trip, they take their mantles off the hooks on the wall and crowns and boxes with gifts off the little shelf. Aldashin’s film is filled with childlike religious wisdom, where the lofty is inseparable from the low, and humor is mixed with awe. 

The youngest of the currently renowned masters of Russian animation is thirty-eight-year-old Konstantin Bronzit. He started out as a cartoonist, and his films (in which he is his own director and artist), are filled with grotesque and sharp graphics. Bronzit likes paradoxes and there is a certain displacement in his films which does not allow these amusing stories to look simply like anecdotes. His film, On the Edge of the Earth, tells of a house which balances, like a swing, on the very top of the mountain, swaying to the right when a crow sits on its roof and to the left when a cow goes for a walk.

Among the youngest generation of animators, those who have not yet turned thirty, there are also directors who have already earned recognition and many international awards. And even today, when Russia’s economic situation does not contribute to the development of this form of art (commercial production of television series and full-length films remains practically impossible), Russian animation continues to exist. Maybe because it is preserved as it was preserved in the middle ages — with the skills passed on from the master to the apprentice. Fyodor Khitruk, who started out in the 1930s, received his training from the hands of Ivanov-Vano and Dezhkin. Khitruk is considered the artistic ancestor of Norshtein, Nazarov and Khrjanovsky. They, in their turn, taught the next generation of animators, for instance Tatarsky. And many of today’s young artists passed through Tatarsky’s Pilot studio, where Aldashin has also taught. Ivan Maksimov is giving courses in Moscow’s Cinematography Institute (VGIK), Konstantin Bronzit is teaching animators at a studio in Petersburg, Alexander Petrov works with children in his home town of Yaroslavl. 

Clearly, this is a story “To be continued.”   RL

Many of the films mentioned in this story are available on VHS or DVD in the series, Masters of Russian Animation, and may be ordered directly through Jove Films (www.jovefilm.com), which produced the multi-title series in association with Soyuzmultfilm Studios.