History of Russian animation
Encyclopedia
The History of Russian animation is very rich, but is so far a nearly unexplored field for Western film theory
and history. As most of Russia's production of animation for film|cinema and television was created during Soviet times, it may also be referred to as the History of Soviet animation.
]
The first animator in Russia was Aleksander Shiryayev, who was a principal dancer at the Imperial Russian Ballet, as well as a teacher and choreographer. He made a number of pioneering puppet-animated ballet films between 1906 and 1909. He only showed them to a few people, and they were forgotten until their re-discovery in 1995.
The second person in Russia to independently discover animation 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 Tsekhanovsky or Nikolay Khodatayev made their debut films in a very fresh and interesting way, aesthetically very different from American animator
s. 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), Tsekhanovsky'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 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 Fyodor Khitruk
's first film as a director, The Story 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 film
s he showed a liking for stop-motion special effects, e.g. in Ilya Muromets
(1956).
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, aesthetic 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 Tsekhanovsky. 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 (in the West, this is known as rotoscoping
).
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 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 Moydodyr (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.
From Khrushchev Thaw
When Nikita Khrushchev
in 1956 proclaimed the end of the personality cult of Joseph 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 The Story of a Crime
(1962). Not only had he changed the animation style to something that resembled what the United Productions of America
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 surrealist
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 subtext
s 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, 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 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
.
Anatoly Petrov, the founder of The Happy Merry-Go-Round , has shown extreme realism (close to photorealistic) in his later films, most notable of which was science fiction Polygon
.
His colleague Gennady Sokolsky tried to use attractive characters in his films, combined with ambient soundtrack: Serebryanoe kopytce , Myshonok Pik , The Adventures of Scamper the Penguin .
Roman Kachanov
made numerous films for children, starting from puppet animation (Varezhka (1967), Cheburashka
series), and later with traditional animation
– The Mystery of the Third Planet
(1981).
Sverdlovsk Film Studio
introduced paint-on-glass animation
with complete new level of quality (Dobro Pozhalovat! , 1986).
One of the most famous Russian animators is Yuriy Norshteyn
. His films Little Hedgehog in the Fog
(1975) and Tale of Tales
(1979) show not only technical mastery (although not smooth animation), but also an unrivaled magic beauty. 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 has not found a possibility to finish his last film, The Overcoat
(clips: http://www.pbs.org/weta/faceofrussia/timeline/quicktime/overcoat1.html, http://www.pbs.org/weta/faceofrussia/timeline/quicktime/overcoat2.html).
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.
In the late days of Studio Ekran (then Multtelefilm), Gennady Tishchenko introduced elements of anime style in Russian animation (Vampires of Geona , 1991, Amba , 1994–1995).
After the end of the Soviet Union
, the situation for Russian animators changed dramatically. On one hand, State subsidies diminished significantly. On the other hand, the number of studio
s competing for that amount of money rose a good deal. 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, e.g. Aleksandr Petrov's (former Sverdlovsk Film Studio
animator) Oscar
-winning The Old Man and the Sea
(1999, from Ernest Hemingway
's novel
) or Stanislav Sokolov
's The Winter's Tale
(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 700 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.
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 would not 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".
Despite the hardships, Natalya Lukinykh has estimated that Russian animated films won about twice as many prestigious international awards in the 1990s as Russian live-action films.http://animator.ru/articles/article.phtml?id=186
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 (e.g. 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 is 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. http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=17500
Osobennyj http://animator.ru/db/?p=show_film&fid=6895, released July 31, 2006, was Russia's first CG-animated
feature film. About 8 such films are now in production by various studios http://www.filmz.ru/pub/36/13245_1.htm. 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.
Beginning in 2009, animation entered a new crisis as Goskino
indefinitely postponed funding for all projects, and for the 2010 budget the state cut animation funding by half. The animation community reacted by appealing to the President and the public. http://animator.ru/index.phtml?p=show_news&nid=1167 http://animator.ru/index.phtml?p=show_news&nid=1221 In 2010, many of the major studios, including Pilot
, were either closed or on the verge of shutting down. The vast majority of studios had relied on state support to some extent, and Goskino did not fulfill any of their contractual obligations to pay for the films that they had ordered and which the studios had already produced.http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=376797 In addition, Disney has been accused of using anti-competitive practices to sideline domestic Russian competition on TV channels.http://niffiwan.livejournal.com/35080.html
Film theory
Film theory is an academic discipline that aims to explore the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for understanding film's relationship to reality, the other arts, individual viewers, and society at large...
and history. As most of Russia's production of animation for film|cinema and television was created during Soviet times, it may also be referred to as the History of Soviet animation.
Beginnings
The second person in Russia to independently discover animation was Ladislas Starevich
Ladislas Starevich
Vladislav Starevich , born Władysław Starewicz , was a Russian and French stop-motion animator who used insects and other animals as his protagonists...
, 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
Stop motion
Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...
later in his life. His first few films, made in 1910, were dark comedies
Black comedy
A black comedy, or dark comedy, is a comic work that employs black humor or gallows humor. The definition of black humor is problematic; it has been argued that it corresponds to the earlier concept of gallows humor; and that, as humor has been defined since Freud as a comedic act that anesthetizes...
on the family lives of cockroaches, and were so revolutionary that they earned Starevich a decoration from the Tsar
Nicholas II of Russia
Nicholas II was the last Emperor of Russia, Grand Prince of Finland, and titular King of Poland. His official short title was Nicholas II, Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias and he is known as Saint Nicholas the Passion-Bearer by the Russian Orthodox Church.Nicholas II ruled from 1894 until...
. Starevich's 41-minute 1913 film The Night Before Christmas
The Night Before Christmas (1913 film)
The Night Before Christmas is a 1913 silent film made in the Russian Empire by Ladislas Starevich, based on the tale of the same name by Nikolai Gogol...
was the first example of the use of stop motion
Stop motion
Stop motion is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence...
and live action in the same scene.
After Starevich's emigration following the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
, 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
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
purposes.
In doing so, these early pioneers could experiment with their equipment as well as with their aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
. Creators like Ivan Ivanov-Vano
Ivan Ivanov-Vano
Ivan Pyetrovich Ivanov-Vano was a Soviet animator and Russian animation director, sometimes called the "Patriarch of Soviet animation"....
, Mikhail Tsekhanovsky or Nikolay Khodatayev made their debut films in a very fresh and interesting way, aesthetically very different from American animator
Animator
An animator is an artist who creates multiple images that give an illusion of movement called animation when displayed in rapid sequence; the images are called frames and key frames. Animators can work in a variety of fields including film, television, video games, and the internet. Usually, an...
s. 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), Tsekhanovsky's Post (1929) and Khodataev's The barrel organ (1934).
Another remarkable figure of the time is Aleksandr Ptushko
Aleksandr Ptushko
Aleksandr Lukich Ptushko is a Soviet animation and fantasy film director, and Meritorious Artist of the RSFSR. Ptushko is frequently referred to as "the Soviet Walt Disney," due to his prominent early role in animation in the Soviet Union, though a more accurate comparison would be to Willis...
. He was a trained architect, but earlier in his life had worked in mechanical engineering
Mechanical engineering
Mechanical engineering is a discipline of engineering that applies the principles of physics and materials science for analysis, design, manufacturing, and maintenance of mechanical systems. It is the branch of engineering that involves the production and usage of heat and mechanical power for the...
. In this field, he is known for the invention of an adding machine that was in use in the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
until the 1970s (an example of it can be seen in Fyodor Khitruk
Fyodor Khitruk
Fyodor Savelyevich Khitruk is one of the most influential animators and animation directors in Russian animation.-Biography:Khitruk was born in Tver, Russian Empire and came to Moscow to study graphic design at the OGIS College for Applied Arts. He graduated in 1936 and started to work with...
's first film as a director, The Story of a Crime
The Story of a Crime
The Story of a Crime is a 1962 Soviet animated film directed by Fedor Khitruk based on a screenplay by Michael Volpin. Produced by Soyuzmultfilm. Music score by Andrey Babaev, sound editing by George Martynuk. Runtime - 19 min...
of 1962). When he joined the puppet animation unit of Mosfilm
Mosfilm
Mosfilm is a film studio, which is often described as the largest and oldest in Russia and in Europe. Its output includes most of the more widely-acclaimed Soviet films, ranging from works by Tarkovsky and Eisenstein , to Red Westerns, to the Akira Kurosawa co-production and the epic Война и Мир...
, 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
Feature film
In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...
animated film, The New Gulliver
The New Gulliver
The New Gulliver is a Soviet stop motion-animated cartoon, and the first to make such extensive use of puppet animation, running almost all the way through the film . The film was released in 1935 to widespread acclaim and earned Ptushko a special prize at the International Cinema Festival in Milan...
(1935). This film mixes puppet animation and live acting. It rewrites Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift was an Irish satirist, essayist, political pamphleteer , poet and cleric who became Dean of St...
'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 film
Feature film
In the film industry, a feature film is a film production made for initial distribution in theaters and being the main attraction of the screening, rather than a short film screened before it; a full length movie...
s he showed a liking for stop-motion special effects, e.g. in Ilya Muromets
Ilya Muromets (film)
Ilya Muromets , known in the US as The Sword and the Dragon and in the UK as The Epic Hero and the Beast , is a Russian fantasy film directed by the noted fantasy director Aleksandr Ptushko, made at Mosfilm and released in 1956. It is based on the byliny tales of the bogatyr Ilya Muromets...
(1956).
Socialist Realism
In 1934, Walt DisneyWalt Disney
Walter Elias "Walt" Disney was an American film producer, director, screenwriter, voice actor, animator, entrepreneur, entertainer, international icon, and philanthropist, well-known for his influence in the field of entertainment during the 20th century. Along with his brother Roy O...
sent a film reel with some shorts of Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse
Mickey Mouse is a cartoon character created in 1928 by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks at The Walt Disney Studio. Mickey is an anthropomorphic black mouse and typically wears red shorts, large yellow shoes, and white gloves...
to the Moscow Film Festival. Fyodor Khitruk
Fyodor Khitruk
Fyodor Savelyevich Khitruk is one of the most influential animators and animation directors in Russian animation.-Biography:Khitruk was born in Tver, Russian Empire and came to Moscow to study graphic design at the OGIS College for Applied Arts. He graduated in 1936 and started to work with...
, 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.
Soyuzmultfilm
Soyuzmultfilm is a Russian animation studio based in Moscow. Over the years it has gained international attention and respect, garnering numerous awards both at home and abroad. Noted for a great variety of style, it is regarded as the most influential animation studio of the former Soviet Union...
-Studio was created from the small and relatively independent trickfilm units of Mosfilm
Mosfilm
Mosfilm is a film studio, which is often described as the largest and oldest in Russia and in Europe. Its output includes most of the more widely-acclaimed Soviet films, ranging from works by Tarkovsky and Eisenstein , to Red Westerns, to the Akira Kurosawa co-production and the epic Война и Мир...
, Sovkino
Sovkino
Sovkino was a studio in what now is Ukraine. It was built to compete with Disney over the market of animated movies in the 1930s.Sovkino was also a name of Lenfilm in 1926—1930....
and Mezhrabpromfilm in order to focus on the creation of Disney-style animation, exclusively using cel
Cel
A cel, short for celluloid, is a transparent sheet on which objects are drawn or painted for traditional, hand-drawn animation. Actual celluloid was used during the first half of the 20th century, but since it was flammable and dimensionally unstable it was largely replaced by cellulose acetate...
technique.
Already since 1932, when a congress of Soviet writers had proclaimed the necessity of Socialist realism
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
, the influence of Futurism
Futurism (art)
Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city...
and the Russian avant-garde
Russian avant-garde
The Russian avant-garde is an umbrella term used to define the large, influential wave of modern art that flourished in Russia approximately 1890 to 1930 - although some place its beginning as early as 1850 and its end as late as 1960...
on animation had dwindled. Now, aesthetic experiments were shoved off the agenda, and for over twenty years, Soyuzmultfilm, as the studio was called from 1936 onwards, worked in a taylorised
Frederick Winslow Taylor
Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. He is regarded as the father of scientific management and was one of the first management consultants...
way, using cel technique and division of labour
Division of labour
Division of labour is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and likeroles. Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation...
. It became the leading animation studio in the Soviet union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, 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 Tsekhanovsky. The Leningrad
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
-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
Socialist realism
Socialist realism is a style of realistic art which was developed in the Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other communist countries. Socialist realism is a teleologically-oriented style having its purpose the furtherance of the goals of socialism and communism...
, 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 (in the West, this is known as rotoscoping
Rotoscope
Rotoscoping is an animation technique in which animators trace over live-action film movement, frame by frame, for use in animated films. Originally, recorded live-action film images were projected onto a frosted glass panel and re-drawn by an animator...
).
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 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
Propaganda
Propaganda is a form of communication that is aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position so as to benefit oneself or one's group....
spots, shot during evacuation
Emergency evacuation
Emergency evacuation is the immediate and rapid movement of people away from the threat or actual occurrence of a hazard. Examples range from the small scale evacuation of a building due to a bomb threat or fire to the large scale evacuation of a district because of a flood, bombardment or...
in Samarkand
Samarkand
Although a Persian-speaking region, it was not united politically with Iran most of the times between the disintegration of the Seleucid Empire and the Arab conquest . In the 6th century it was within the domain of the Turkic kingdom of the Göktürks.At the start of the 8th century Samarkand came...
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 Moydodyr (there is a first version from 1927, but it lacks the fluidity of the later version) or Lev Atamanov with The Snow Queen
The Snow Queen (1957 film)
The Snow Queen is a 1957 Soviet animated film directed by Lev Atamanov. It was produced at the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow and is based on the story of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen...
(1957, told after Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen
Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet noted for his children's stories. These include "The Steadfast Tin Soldier," "The Snow Queen," "The Little Mermaid," "Thumbelina," "The Little Match Girl," and "The Ugly Duckling."...
'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 ThawKhrushchev ThawThe Khrushchev Thaw refers to the period from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, when repression and censorship in the Soviet Union were partially reversed and millions of Soviet political prisoners were released from Gulag labor camps, due to Nikita Khrushchev's policies of de-Stalinization and...
to PerestroikaPerestroikaPerestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...
in 1956 proclaimed the end of the personality cult of Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 to 5 March 1953. He was among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the October Revolution and had held the position of first General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's Central Committee...
, 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
Fyodor Khitruk
Fyodor Savelyevich Khitruk is one of the most influential animators and animation directors in Russian animation.-Biography:Khitruk was born in Tver, Russian Empire and came to Moscow to study graphic design at the OGIS College for Applied Arts. He graduated in 1936 and started to work with...
's film The Story of a Crime
The Story of a Crime
The Story of a Crime is a 1962 Soviet animated film directed by Fedor Khitruk based on a screenplay by Michael Volpin. Produced by Soyuzmultfilm. Music score by Andrey Babaev, sound editing by George Martynuk. Runtime - 19 min...
(1962). Not only had he changed the animation style to something that resembled what the United Productions of America
United Productions of America
United Productions of America, better known as UPA, was an American animation studio of the 1940s through present day, beginning with industrial films and World War II training films. In the late 1940s, UPA produced theatrical shorts for Columbia Pictures, most notably the Mr. Magoo series. In...
was doing, but for the first time since the avantgarde years, he was able to tackle a contemporary story.
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
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.
Nu, pogodi!
Nu, pogodi! is a Soviet/Russian animated series produced by Soyuzmultfilm. The series was created in 1969 and became a popular cartoon of the Soviet Union. Additional episodes have been produced in Russia since 2006...
(Just you wait!), directed by Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin. These seemingly simple miniatures about a wolf chasing a hare through Soviet-style cartoon
Cartoon
A cartoon is a form of two-dimensional illustrated visual art. While the specific definition has changed over time, modern usage refers to a typically non-realistic or semi-realistic drawing or painting intended for satire, caricature, or humor, or to the artistic style of such works...
worlds owe a great deal of their popularity to the cunning subtext
Subtext
Subtext or undertone is content of a book, play, musical work, film, video game, or television series which is not announced explicitly by the characters but is implicit or becomes something understood by the observer of the work as the production unfolds. Subtext can also refer to the thoughts...
s built into their parts.
During the Stalin period, puppet
Puppet
A puppet is an inanimate object or representational figure animated or manipulated by an entertainer, who is called a puppeteer. It is used in puppetry, a play or a presentation that is a very ancient form of theatre....
animation had come to a halt. Only in 1953 was a puppet division was refounded at Soyuzmultfilm
Soyuzmultfilm
Soyuzmultfilm is a Russian animation studio based in Moscow. Over the years it has gained international attention and respect, garnering numerous awards both at home and abroad. Noted for a great variety of style, it is regarded as the most influential animation studio of the former Soviet Union...
. 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
Aleksandr Ptushko
Aleksandr Lukich Ptushko is a Soviet animation and fantasy film director, and Meritorious Artist of the RSFSR. Ptushko is frequently referred to as "the Soviet Walt Disney," due to his prominent early role in animation in the Soviet Union, though a more accurate comparison would be to Willis...
. Among the most outstanding of these young artists were Vadim Kurchevskiy and Nikolay Serebryakov
Nikolay Serebryakov
Nikolay Nikolayevich Serebryakov was a Soviet and Russian director of animated films and a People's Artist of Russia .-External links:...
, 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 Kurchevskiy's masterpiece, The Master of Clamecy (1972, after Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland
Romain Rolland was a French dramatist, novelist, essayist, art historian and mystic who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915.-Biography:...
's novel Colas Breugnon). One generation later, Stanislav Sokolov
Stanislav Sokolov
Stanislav Mihaylovich Sokolov is a Russian stop-motion animation director. He graduated from VGIK in 1971 and has since then worked with Studios Soyuzmultfilm, DEFA, Christmasfilms and S4C. He was awarded a number of prizes for his films, most notably an Emmy in 1992 for his contribution to The...
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
Andersen
Andersen is a Danish-Norwegian patronymic surname meaning "son of Anders"...
) or Black and White Film (1985), which won a prize in Zagreb
Zagreb
Zagreb is the capital and the largest city of the Republic of Croatia. It is in the northwest of the country, along the Sava river, at the southern slopes of the Medvednica mountain. Zagreb lies at an elevation of approximately above sea level. According to the last official census, Zagreb's city...
.
Anatoly Petrov, the founder of The Happy Merry-Go-Round , has shown extreme realism (close to photorealistic) in his later films, most notable of which was science fiction Polygon
Polygon (film)
Polygon is a 1977 Soviet animation science fiction short film.-Plot summary:The plot is based on an anti-war military science fiction story by Sever Gansovsky....
.
His colleague Gennady Sokolsky tried to use attractive characters in his films, combined with ambient soundtrack: Serebryanoe kopytce , Myshonok Pik , The Adventures of Scamper the Penguin .
Roman Kachanov
Roman Abelevich Kachanov
Roman Abelevich Kachanov was a Russian animator, one of the founders and leaders of Russian stop-motion animation.Kachanov was the director and screenwriter of the trilogy about Cheburashka, Gena the Crocodile and Shapoklyak.- Early years :...
made numerous films for children, starting from puppet animation (Varezhka (1967), Cheburashka
Cheburashka (film)
Cheburashka is a 1971 Soviet/Russian film directed by Roman Kachanov.- Plot summary :Crocodile Gena's birthday. Cheburashka wishes him a happy birthday and gives him a gift...
series), and later with traditional animation
Traditional animation
Traditional animation, is an animation technique where each frame is drawn by hand...
– The Mystery of the Third Planet
The Mystery of the Third Planet
The Mystery of the Third Planet , aka The Secret of the Third Planet is a 1981 Soviet traditionally-animated feature film directed by Roman Kachanov and produced by the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow...
(1981).
Sverdlovsk Film Studio
Sverdlovsk Film Studio
Sverdlovsk Film Studio is a Russian film studio based in Yekaterinburg . It was established by a decision of the Council of People's Commissars on February 4, 1943-Feature films:...
introduced paint-on-glass animation
Paint-on-glass animation
Paint-on-glass animation is a technique for making animated films by manipulating slow-drying oil paints on sheets of glass. Gouache mixed with glycerine is sometimes used instead...
with complete new level of quality (Dobro Pozhalovat! , 1986).
Yuriy Norshteyn
Yuriy Borisovich Norshteyn , or Yuri Norstein is an award-winning Soviet and Russian animator best known for his animated shorts, Hedgehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales...
. His films Little Hedgehog in the Fog
Hedgehog in the Fog
Hedgehog in the Fog is a 1975 Soviet/Russian animated film directed by Yuriy Norshteyn, produced by the Soyuzmultfilm studio in Moscow. The Russian script was written by Sergei Grigoryevich Kozlov, who also published a book under the same name...
(1975) and Tale of Tales
Tale of Tales
-External links:* at the Animator.ru**...
(1979) show not only technical mastery (although not smooth animation), but also an unrivaled magic beauty. 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
Perestroika
Perestroika was a political movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during 1980s, widely associated with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev...
, Norshteyn has not found a possibility to finish his last film, The Overcoat
The Overcoat (animated film)
The Overcoat is an upcoming animated feature film that has been the main project of acclaimed Russian director and animator Yuriy Norshteyn since 1981. It is based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol with the same name....
(clips: http://www.pbs.org/weta/faceofrussia/timeline/quicktime/overcoat1.html, http://www.pbs.org/weta/faceofrussia/timeline/quicktime/overcoat2.html).
Other directors were more able to cope with the changes that this time brought; they even commented on it in their films. Garri Bardin
Garri Bardin
Garri Bardin is a Russian animation director, screenwriter and producer and director. During Soviet times he was with Soyuzmultfilm, and in 1991 he founded his own studio, Stayer. In 2010, the studio finished making a feature-length animated film based on The Ugly Duckling, which Bardin directed...
'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
Aleksandr Tatarskiy
Aleksander Mihailovich Tatarskiy was a Soviet/Russian animation film director, script writer and producer, animator and an artist of Ukrainian origin...
even managed to found his own studio (Pilot
Pilot (studio)
Pilot was a Russian animation studio based in Moscow. It was founded in 1988 by Aleksandr Tatarskiy, Igor Kovalyov and Anatoliy Prokhorov, becoming the first private animation studio in the Soviet Union.-History:...
) in 1988, where he produced absurd films inspired by the Zagreb School. Yuriy Norshteyn and three other leading animators (Fyodor Khitruk
Fyodor Khitruk
Fyodor Savelyevich Khitruk is one of the most influential animators and animation directors in Russian animation.-Biography:Khitruk was born in Tver, Russian Empire and came to Moscow to study graphic design at the OGIS College for Applied Arts. He graduated in 1936 and started to work with...
, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, and Eduard Nazarov) founded a school and studio in 1993 which exists to this day, called SHAR Studio.
In the late days of Studio Ekran (then Multtelefilm), Gennady Tishchenko introduced elements of anime style in Russian animation (Vampires of Geona , 1991, Amba , 1994–1995).
Russian animation today
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, the situation for Russian animators changed dramatically. On one hand, State subsidies diminished significantly. On the other hand, the number of studio
Studio
A studio is an artist's or worker's workroom, or the catchall term for an artist and his or her employees who work within that studio. This can be for the purpose of architecture, painting, pottery , sculpture, scrapbooking, photography, graphic design, filmmaking, animation, radio or television...
s competing for that amount of money rose a good deal. 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, e.g. Aleksandr Petrov's (former Sverdlovsk Film Studio
Sverdlovsk Film Studio
Sverdlovsk Film Studio is a Russian film studio based in Yekaterinburg . It was established by a decision of the Council of People's Commissars on February 4, 1943-Feature films:...
animator) Oscar
Academy Awards
An Academy Award, also known as an Oscar, is an accolade bestowed by the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to recognize excellence of professionals in the film industry, including directors, actors, and writers...
-winning The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea (1999 film)
The Old Man and the Sea is a 1999 paint-on-glass-animated short film directed by Aleksandr Petrov, based on the novel of the same name by Ernest Hemingway. The film won many awards, including the Academy Award for Animated Short Film...
(1999, from Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
's novel
The Old Man and the Sea
The Old Man and the Sea is a novel written by American author Ernest Hemingway in 1951 in Cuba, and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction to be produced by Hemingway and published in his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it centers upon Santiago, an aging fisherman who...
) or Stanislav Sokolov
Stanislav Sokolov
Stanislav Mihaylovich Sokolov is a Russian stop-motion animation director. He graduated from VGIK in 1971 and has since then worked with Studios Soyuzmultfilm, DEFA, Christmasfilms and S4C. He was awarded a number of prizes for his films, most notably an Emmy in 1992 for his contribution to The...
's The Winter's Tale
Shakespeare: the Animated Tales
thumb|right|[[Banquo]] and [[Fleance]] from the "Macbeth" episode. Shakespeare: The Animated Tales comprised two six-part television series, first broadcast in 1992 and 1994...
(1999, from William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's play) that earned the director an Emmy.
Soyuzmultfilm
Soyuzmultfilm
Soyuzmultfilm is a Russian animation studio based in Moscow. Over the years it has gained international attention and respect, garnering numerous awards both at home and abroad. Noted for a great variety of style, it is regarded as the most influential animation studio of the former Soviet Union...
, the former juggernaut of Russian animation studios (at one time employing as many as 700 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.
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 would not 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".
Despite the hardships, Natalya Lukinykh has estimated that Russian animated films won about twice as many prestigious international awards in the 1990s as Russian live-action films.http://animator.ru/articles/article.phtml?id=186
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 (e.g. Melnitsa Animation Studio
Melnitsa Animation Studio
Melnitsa Animation Studio is a Saint Petersburg-based Russian studio which produces animated films. There is also a section of the studio devoted to digital special effects for the use of its own projects as well as for live-action films....
's Little Longnose
Little Longnose
Little Longnose is a Russian traditionally-animated feature film directed by Ilya Maksimov, made by Melnitsa Animation Studio. It opened in Russia on March 20, 2003, and had 375,000 admissions during its theatrical run...
, 2003, from Wilhelm Hauff
Wilhelm Hauff
Wilhelm Hauff was a German poet and novelist.-Early life:Hauff was born in Stuttgart, the son of August Friedrich Hauff, a secretary in the ministry of foreign affairs, and Hedwig Wilhelmine Elsaesser Hauff...
's fairy tale, and Solnechny Dom Studio's 2006 Prince Vladimir
Prince Vladimir (film)
Prince Vladimir is a 2006 Russian traditionally-animated feature film loosely based on the story of Prince Vladimir, a historically important figure who converted Kievan Rus' to Christianity a thousand years ago...
, based on early history of Rus'
Kievan Rus'
Kievan Rus was a medieval polity in Eastern Europe, from the late 9th to the mid 13th century, when it disintegrated under the pressure of the Mongol invasion of 1237–1240....
– 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 is 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. http://www.sptimes.ru/index.php?action_id=2&story_id=17500
Osobennyj http://animator.ru/db/?p=show_film&fid=6895, released July 31, 2006, was Russia's first CG-animated
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
feature film. About 8 such films are now in production by various studios http://www.filmz.ru/pub/36/13245_1.htm. At the same time, Soyuzmultfilm has partnered up with Mikhail Shemyakin and is working on Gofmaniada
Gofmaniada
Hoffmaniada is a stop motion-animated feature film from Russian studio Soyuzmultfilm. The concept and all of the art design was done by Mikhail Shemyakin and it is being directed by Stanislav Sokolov....
, a puppet-animated feature film which is deliberately being made entirely without computers.
Beginning in 2009, animation entered a new crisis as Goskino
Goskino
Goskino USSR is the abbreviated name for the USSR State Committee for Cinematography in the Soviet Union...
indefinitely postponed funding for all projects, and for the 2010 budget the state cut animation funding by half. The animation community reacted by appealing to the President and the public. http://animator.ru/index.phtml?p=show_news&nid=1167 http://animator.ru/index.phtml?p=show_news&nid=1221 In 2010, many of the major studios, including Pilot
Pilot (studio)
Pilot was a Russian animation studio based in Moscow. It was founded in 1988 by Aleksandr Tatarskiy, Igor Kovalyov and Anatoliy Prokhorov, becoming the first private animation studio in the Soviet Union.-History:...
, were either closed or on the verge of shutting down. The vast majority of studios had relied on state support to some extent, and Goskino did not fulfill any of their contractual obligations to pay for the films that they had ordered and which the studios had already produced.http://www.vesti.ru/doc.html?id=376797 In addition, Disney has been accused of using anti-competitive practices to sideline domestic Russian competition on TV channels.http://niffiwan.livejournal.com/35080.html
Disney's Russian Distribution
The Walt Disney Company will have its brand new major distribution arm in Russia known as Disney CIS or The Walt Disney Company CIS. And part of Disney CIS will be Disneyfilm CIS as part of the Russian Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group.In popular culture
- An episode of The SimpsonsThe SimpsonsThe Simpsons is an American animated sitcom created by Matt Groening for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series is a satirical parody of a middle class American lifestyle epitomized by its family of the same name, which consists of Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and Maggie...
called "Krusty Gets KancelledKrusty Gets Kancelled"Krusty Gets Kancelled" is the twenty-second and final episode of The Simpsons fourth season. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on May 13, 1993. In the episode, a new show featuring a puppet named Gabbo premieres in Springfield and competes with Krusty the Clown's show...
" features a parody of Eastern Bloc animation, a cat and mouse duo known as Worker and Parasite. The show's creater Matt GroeningMatt GroeningMatthew Abram "Matt" Groening is an American cartoonist, screenwriter, and producer. He is the creator of the comic strip Life in Hell as well as two successful television series, The Simpsons and Futurama....
has stated that Worker and Parasite is one of his favourite moments in The Simpsons history. - The Irish comedy act Diet Of Worms created a series of short animations in the early Soviet style known as The Adventures Of Puffincat. The cartoons are narrated by a man speaking in a heavily exaggerated Russian accent.
- In 2004 the Israeli couple Yonathan and Masha Zur, has released a documentary film about Russian Animation in Soviet Times, called Magia RussicaMagia RussicaMagia Russica is an Israeli-Russian documentary film, written, directed and produced by Yonathan and Masha Zur . It depicts the untold story of Russian animation in Soviet times....
.
See also
- Cinema of the world
- Encyclopedia of Domestic AnimationEncyclopedia of Domestic AnimationThe Encyclopedia of Domestic Animation is a collection of biographies and filmographies of the masters of Russian and Soviet animation. It was released at the 12th Open Russian Festival of Animated Film in March 2007, and its general release happened on March 11...
- KROK International Animated Films FestivalKROK International Animated Films FestivalThe KROK International Animated Films Festival is an annual international animation film festival. It is held in Russia on even years and in Ukraine on odd years. The festival takes place over the course of 12 days between September and October on the cruise ship Taras Shevchenko...
- Open Russian Festival of Animated FilmOpen Russian Festival of Animated FilmThe Open Russian Festival of Animated Film is an annual animation film festival held in Suzdal, Russia. It is the only festival devoted to professional appraisal of domestic Russian animation...
External links
- Animator.ru – the homepage of the Russian animation community. Includes an English-language database of films, people and studios. www.myltik.ru Another database of Russian animation www.multonline.ru/spisok Database with several works avaiable for streaming Our Animations – an online version of a book that covers 60 major Soviet and Russian animation directors, with screenshots
- Soyuzmultfilm homepage The most famous Russian animation studio's home page
- www.pilot-film.com Another famous studio's homepage (in Russian and English).
- Russian Insider – a blog focusing on current and past Russian/Soviet animation
- www.filmfundsoyuzmultfilm.com Soyuzmultfilm's film archive.
- Soviet cartoons of the 1940s and the 1950s watchable and downloadable with Esperanto subtitles
- MASTERS OF RUSSIAN ANIMATION Video Collection on IFILM
- Blog about Russian Animation Influence in Cuban Culture
- Videoblog with modern Russian animation subtitled in Esperanto
- MAGIA RUSSICA – a documentary film on Russian Animation
News articles
- The St. Petersburg Times (Russia) – a May 2006 article about the film Prince VladimirPrince Vladimir (film)Prince Vladimir is a 2006 Russian traditionally-animated feature film loosely based on the story of Prince Vladimir, a historically important figure who converted Kievan Rus' to Christianity a thousand years ago...
and the future of the animation industry in Russia - Redrawing Russian History (May 18, 2006)
- In-depth history of the appalling and criminal happenings at Soyuzmultfilm during the 1990s
- An overview of Russian animated feature films in the 1990s and early 2000s
- Russian animation in search of a hero Maria Tereschenko, Russia Beyond the HeadlinesRussia Beyond the HeadlinesRussia Beyond the Headlines is a branch of Russian state-owned newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta which publishes a number of foreign-language newspaper supplements and maintains the RBTH news website. The supplements are included in international newspapers in an effort to cultivate a positive view of...
, December 17, 2009 (English), article with some animated films with English subtitles.