A luminous, painterly, Oscar-winning interpretation of a beloved literary classic was the subject of Monday night’s Animation Celebration, the latest installment of the now-long-running film conversation series hosted by Haley Grunloh, library technical assistant at the Mitchell Branch of the New Haven Free Public Library.
Animation Celebration happens monthly on Zoom. Over a year into its run, it has attracted a steady number of participants. Monday evening a dozen of them were there to discussion Aleksandr Petrov’s short animated film The Old Man and the Sea, which faithfully re-creates the classic Ernest Hemingway novella about Santiago, an old Spanish fisherman in Cuba who hopes to break an 84-day dry spell by going out and catching a really big fish. The real star of the film, however, is the animation itself — somewhere in the neighborhood of 29,000 oil paintings strung together frame by painstaking frame to create a movie of sometimes breathtaking beauty.
Grunloh explained that Petrov was a student of famous Russian animator Yuri Norstein (subject of a previous installment of Animation Celebration), and like Norstein, Petrov hasn’t been “super prolific,” Grunloh said; he has made eight short films since 1988. For The Old Man and the Sea, as a helpful featurette explains, he did most of the animation himself, assisted by his son Dmitri. They used an interesting technique to create the frames, as Petrov applied slow-drying oil paint to panes of backlit glass that he then “smudged around to make the next frame, even using his fingers,” Grunloh said. The light coming from underneath gave it the “magical glow” that suffuses the entire film.
“It was really difficult for them,” Grunloh said. “They couldn’t stop working during a shot because otherwise the paint would dry.” That meant that “they pulled a lot of all-nighters.” In the end, “it took them about two and a half years” in total. Grunloh noted it was also the first animated film to be shot with an IMAX camera. “I’m a little sad I never got to see it that way,” she said. “This is one of my favorite short films, even though I confess I’ve never read The Old Man and the Sea.”
This came as a small surprise to the participants, most of whom had been assigned it at some point in school. “I guess I’m the only person that didn’t have to read it,” she said with a laugh.
One participant noted that this wasn’t the first time The Old Man and the Sea has been put to film. Spencer Tracy starred in the first version in 1958. Anthony Quinn starred in a 1990 miniseries. Since Petrov’s film in 1999, there has also been a Kazahstani version, released in 2012.
“It was very faithful to the story, I thought,” the participant said of Petrov’s film. “The old man is there, but he’s thinking all these things from other times in his life, or thinking philosophically about the meaning of things — and then he gets jerked by the fish and has to come back to reality.”
Grunloh noted that Petrov himself “compares himself to the old man character, in that catching the fish is this labor of passion and he doesn’t know if it’s going to pay off or not.” The parallels to making the film, for Petrov, were many.
“He’s fighting time,” one participant observed of the way Petrov decided to make the film. “He’s like a fresco painter, and at the same time it’s like a mandala, because he has to destroy it.”
“The paintings must have been so beautiful on their own, and then they got destroyed,” Grunloh said. “It has my favorite water animation. Just amazing.” They talked for a moment about how the water in the film was almost a character. “It was always changing, and changeable,” said a participant. “Sometimes it’s perfectly calm and sparkly, and other times it’s violent and dramatic,” Grunloh said.
Many of them particularly liked a point in the film when Santiago falls asleep in the boat and, in his dreams, joins the marlin he has on the line underwater. “Through their artistry, they were able to have a bioluminescent effect — an abyss and then bioluminescence. That really captivated my attention,” said one participant. “He becomes one with the fish in the ocean. It’s like he’s connecting to the universe in a way,” said another.
Grunloh returned to the topic of Santiago and the parallels with Petrov. “There’s a lonely feeling in a lot of the story,” Grunloh said of the fisherman. “He’s struggling with a project all on his own, but he’s part of a community.”
“I think he’s preoccupied with his losses — the loss of his strength and ability — and he doesn’t realize there’s some compensation to it,” said one participant, noting that his boy companion on shore, who says he needs teaching, gives meaning to some of Santiago’s struggles, whether the fisherman knows that or not.
One participant had seen the the recent Ken Burns-produced PBS documentary about Hemingway. “My impression is that Hemingway writes only about Hemingway,” he said. “The old man’s struggles are really about Hemingway’s struggles. The fish is his next great novel that he’s been trying to finish for a long time and failing,” and “the sharks” — that is, the ones that (spoiler alert!) eat the fish after Santiago catches it — “are the critics who say that he’s lost his edge.”
But the animated film is “not really about Hemingway and instead it’s about the animator,” said another participant. “Someone who has dedicated his life to this meticulous, labor-intensive craft.” Which brought the conversation to the sheer beauty of the film.
“That technique is just basically impossible,” said one participant. “To just do that with his fingertips is amazing and beautiful — just the colors and the shading.”
”I can see why he’d want to do a story like The Old Man and the Sea. Such beautiful things to paint with that technique,” said another.
“And so many things to do with light,” Grunloh said.
“The medium added such a beautiful dimension to it,” said one participant, noting that it reminded her of the painted feature-length film Loving Vincent.
Grunloh observed that the technique made the faces blurry enough that Petrov “relies on other ways to show the characters’ emotions,” through lighting and mood. Though the characters are instantly recognizable as individuals. in the featurette, Petrov revealed that Santiago was, in fact, based on his father-in-law — the kind of man who, had he been fishing, would probably have gotten the fish.
That brought up one of the film’s themes, about “the relationship between hunters and nature — they love it but then go out and kill everything in it,” as one participant put it.“It’s an engagement with nature I wrestle with. I know some people go out in order to conquer it.”
“The old man plays both sides. He respects the fish” even as he hunts it, another participant said. “He would rather almost be the fish, though at the same time he’s hunting it. It’s a contradiction.”
Grunloh: “I don’t feel that conflicted about it because the fisherman is subsistence fishing,” Grunloh said. “You wouldn’t say the sharks are being obnoxious, killing fish in order to survive.” But in the context of Hemingway’s life, the fishing took on another dimension. “I don’t think trophy hunting feels noble or purposeful,” she said, noting that “Hemingway was into trophy hunting.”
“We are so protected from the grossness of killing,” said another participant. “We’re really in a rarefied atmosphere, and it’s unusual in human history”; for most of it, she observed, people have gone out and killed and eaten things. “We read all this stuff into it because now we learn that carrots feel it when we tear them out of the ground,” and “carrots talk to each other as they’re marching along in the soil.” She took the chance to run wryly with her idea. “Now do they mourn when one of their buddies is ripped out and eaten? I kind of doubt it, but maybe we’ll find out there’s carrot depression.”
“There were ways to kill and hunt that he respected and there were ways he did not respect,” one participant said of Santiago. “He respects the fish but he doesn’t respect the sharks” that eat the fish after Santiago has landed it.
That reminded another participant of the way she learned people hunted wolves in Wisconsin recently, with laser sights and drones, so that the wolves didn’t really stand much of a chance. “Sometimes toxic masculinity plays into it,” she said, which brought her to the fact that she’d read The Old Man and the Sea recently as an adult, and it hit her differently than it did when she was a student.
“I don’t like the old man,” she said. Of his relationship with the marlin, “he becomes it but kills it” — and ends up the hero.
Another participant also saw the hubris involved. “He had to get this fish,” the biggest fish he could catch, she said. “Maybe if he’d had more modest goals he would have been successful.” Instead, “this beautiful animal is destroyed and nothing came of it.”
“Maybe he could have just caught a net full of sardines,” a participant joked.
“It’s going to be interesting what people think of this book when they’re 95 years old and can’t get out to the car without someone helping them,” said another. “Nature is nature. Don’t count on all of us getting a fair shake.” Of Santiago, she said, “he’s doing what we all do. He’s struggling to keep going.” But “he’s just not up to what he used to be.”
With the hour drawing to a close, Grunloh asked the participants if they had any final thoughts.
“I hope you all find your marlins,” said one.
Check the New Haven Free Public Library’s events page for the date of the next installment of Animation Celebration as well as the library’s many other offerings.
