Animation Series Grapples With Russian Master

Before the latest installment of Animation Celebration! — a film discussion series hosted by the New Haven Free Public Library — a participant beamed as the Zoom meeting for the discussion began to fill up.

“I’m watching all these movies I wouldn’t have watched!” she said. And ​“talking more about it makes you feel connected to it more.”

Monday evening’s discussion was no exception, as 12 participants, in a conversation facilitated by Haley Grunloh, library technical assistant at Mitchell Library, dug into three short animated films by Yuri Norstein, beloved in Russia, Japan, and elsewhere but little-known in the United States. Watching his films The Battle of Kerjenets (1971), Hedgehog in the Fog (1975), and especially Tale of Tales (1979), it was easy to understand why he’s considered one of the greatest animators in history, and why his films are so ripe for discussion.

Before diving in, Grunloh gave some quick background on Norstein. Born in 1941, he was a child during World War II and its immediate aftermath. As a young man he joined the Soyuzmultfilm studio, which was known for a technique called cutout animation, ​“one of the oldest types of animation,” Grunloh said. ​“It’s one of the fastest and cheapest ways to make animation — at least before we had all these digital techniques.”

Grunloh explained how it worked. ​“You have a big camera and it’s facing down on your surface. All the backgrounds and other elements are laid down on the surface and you can move them around.” At its most simple, the backgrounds could be painted and the moveable characters could be paper dolls. The rest was essentially stop-motion. ​“You move your paper doll a tiny bit, take a picture, move again, take a picture, again and again until you have a movie,” Grunloh said.

In the 1970s, when Norstein was working, another high-profile animator using this technique was Terry Gilliam, part of the crew of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. ​“He had to turn out his stuff really quickly,” Grunloh said, and used the technique to make funny shorts that leaned into the static characters. The first episodes of South Park were also animated this way.

The choice of technique, often associated with fast, cruder animation, is part of ​“why Yuri Norstein is kind of interesting,” Grunloh said. ​“He was taking it in a totally opposite direction.” He used cutout animation to make ​“heavy, atmospheric films.” He is also a ​“crazy perfectionist,” she added. ​“Each little piece is painted really carefully…. It’s hard to believe that it’s cutout animation. He was really pushing the limits.”

To make his films, Norstein stacked four or five layers of glass underneath the camera. Instead of paper cutouts, he painted his characters and backgrounds on celluloid so the pieces could be transparent. The planes of glass could also be moved closer together and farther apart to get different effects and camera movements. He also experimented with lighting from different angles.

He directed or co-directed six films between 1968 and 1979. Since 1981, Norstein, now 78, has been working on a feature film called The Overcoat, based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol. ​“If he ever finishes, it will hold the record for the longest film production in history,” Grunloh said. The glacial pace of production has earned Norstein the nickname of The Golden Snail. Though the technological possibilities for animation have progressed by leaps and bounds since the 1970s, Grunloh said that ​“he refuses to use computers for anything, still. He says that he doesn’t want to bother with computers because ​‘they don’t allow for divine mistakes.’”

The Battle of Kerjenets

The Battle of Kerjenets, which Norstein co-directed with Ivan Ivanov-Vano, is ​“an earlier film” made when Norstein was up and coming. ​“It wasn’t his total creative vision the way the other two films we watched are,” Grunloh said. The film relates the Russian folktale of a city in peril of being attacked by Mongols, but the residents of the city are so devout that God either renders the city invisible or submerges it in a lake. For a score, it uses music from an opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov that relates the same story.

“Anyone want to give some thoughts?” Grunloh said.

One participant zeroed in on the specific imagery in the film, which is taken from art in Russian Orthodox churches. ​“I thought it was about the Crusades,” she said. She thought she saw allusions to rats and the plague. Grunloh sympathized. Without knowing the background to the film, it was difficult to see the story — though there was also general agreement that for Russians, who already knew the story, it was possibly unnecessary to explain. There was discussion over the ramifications of creating a film with religious overtones in the Soviet Union. Was that a problem? Was there trouble with censors? Grunloh then related that Norstein had had at least one encounter with censorship; he’d wanted a different title for Tale of Tales but was not allowed to use it.

Still, even without knowing the context, the participants admired how ​“without any words, without any dialogue,” Norstein could ​“convey the pride” of the city, as one person put it. Another participant was familiar with the story and the opera, and offered more details. ​“They were so pure, they were so holy,” that God protected them, he said. ​“There’s a story that if you’re pure and you swim in the lake, you’ll be able to find the city.”

“They just stole the Atlantis story,” he added with a shrug.

“It’s too bad the United States doesn’t take animation more seriously, the way other countries do,” another participant said.

Grunloh agreed. ​“Other countries have way more of a range of genres with animation. We tend to think of animation of having to be kid-friendly. We don’t venture beyond that the way they do in Europe and Japan. Maybe it’s Disney — he wanted everything to be family-friendly.”

Hedgehog in the Fog

Hewing closely to the idea of folktales, the titular animal in Hedgehog ventures into a patch of fog because he’s worried about a horse he spies in the mist and whether the horse will choke if it lies down. Once in the fog, however, the hedgehog loses his bearings entirely and has a series of encounters with other animals, before finally reemerging for tea — possibly a very different creature than he was at the beginning. Hedgehog is an example of Norstein in complete creative control, leading to some truly stunning visuals.

“You mentioned textures!” Grunloh said, picking up on a point made earlier. She said that Norstein had made the fog effects with layers of frosted paper. ​“It is Hayao Miyazaki’s favorite film” — Miyazaki, of Studio Ghibli fame — ​“which made me ashamed that I didn’t know much about it,” Grunloh said. Since it was made, she continued, ​“it has had a huge impact on animators.”

For the participants, that began with the hedgehog and his movements. ​“You could see it was a very simple movement, but it gave him this delicate character,” one participant said.

“I think the water and fire might be footage of real water and fire spliced in there,” said another. Grunloh noted that all three films used water. ​“He’s almost challenging himself with those reflections,” she said, to make it work visually. The discussion turned to the general mood of the piece, somehow friendly and sinister at the same time.

“What is the horse supposed to symbolize?” asked one participant.

“He’s haunted by that horse,” Grunloh said of the hedgehog.

“There’s a couple of fairy tales about horses,” said another participant. ​“They’re from the heavens, they’re sort of angelic.” He mentioned another Russian film about a horse that partook of same vibe. ​“I’ll post it in the chat if I can find it.” He did, and did.

“The horse was his motivation for going into the fog, with the question of whether he’d choke in the fog,” Grunloh said. ​“At the very end he looks back and the horse seems to be fine.” But the ending is ambiguous. Grunloh said she watched the film about five or six times in preparation for the discussion. ​“The horse might almost have a spiritual significance. The hedgehog is a changed hedgehog at the end. He’s been through something that moved his soul.”

Another participant agreed. ​“He has a dazed expression and he can’t tell what’s happened to him.”

“It’s a sad, sinister ending,” another participant said. ​“Something has been lost by him going into the fog.”

“But there’s also a sense of awe,” Grunloh said. ​“It’s spooky but awe-inspiring.”

At one moment in the film, the hedgehog falls into river and simply allows himself to be carried away by the current. The participants wondered aloud to each other if there wasn’t something distinctly Russian about that moment (in full disclosure, this reporter had the exact same thought).

“When he falls in the water, instead of trying to get out, he’s just resigned,” Grunloh said.

“Is that how a lot of people felt about the revolution?” another participant asked, before adding ​“I have no idea. It could be entirely misplaced.”

“Usually folktales have a lesson to be learned. What was the lesson in this folk tale? It seems like something that would be ageless,” said another participant.

“Haunting, like that horse — you can think about it forever and never really understand,” Grunloh said. Norstein’s films ​“don’t settle you. They leave you wondering, a little uncertain.” Some were ​“parts of Russian folklore,” as one participant identified, but the film also ​“has a lot of stuff that is purely Yuri Norstein’s input and his concepts,” Grunloh said. Perhaps things ​“we in America just don’t understand,” another participant said. ​“We didn’t live through that era.”

Tale of Tales

The impressionistic and staggeringly beautiful Tale of Tales moves from sequence to sequence like a dream. Houses are boarded up. A child eats an apple beneath a tree, accompanied by a mother and clearly alcoholic father. A wolf has an encounter with a baby. People dine in the sun. A bull and a girl jump rope. In a particularly moving sequence, young couples dance in the street; then the young men go off to war and don’t return.

Grunloh related that Nosrtein said Tale of Tales is based on his memories of early childhood. ​“It’s structured like a memory — definitely not clear-cut storytelling,” she said. ​“If I was Russian and had that history, I’d probably be getting a lot out of this that I’m not.” But she added another tantalizing detail: that Norstein had also said that the film uses ​“simple concepts that give you the strength to live.” She also said that the film ​“has won a billion awards, including best-of-all-time awards,” and been the subject of books and numerous articles.

“It seems like the kind of movie you’d have to watch over and over again,” said one participant.

“When you think about what your earliest childhood memories are, they’re so vague … what is real and what is made up?” Grunloh said. In the film, memories, impressions, and emotions mixed with one other. Early in the film, a bull and girl jump rope. By the end, the bull is jumping rope by itself. What does it mean?

The participants agreed the sequence with the young men going off to war was more straightforward. The accordionist in the film had only one leg, Grunloh noted. All the men disappeared to go off to fight. Then the women received triangular letters informing them of the men’s deaths and injuries. When the war ended, ​“just a few came back.”

Yet the entire film was ​“structured like a lullaby,” one participant said. ​“Certain parts keep coming back, over and over again.”

“I want to talk about the apple,” said one participant — the apple the boy eats, then shares with crows, before his father takes him away. Later, he’s eating the apple again, but this time leaning against another apple better than he is.

“You said something about the crows being sinister, but I saw them as sort of goofy-looking,” Grunloh said.

But crows ​“always symbolize death,” the participant countered, even if, as a kid, the narrator was too young to understand that. ​“They’re carrion eaters and battle will feed them.”

“I keep likening this film to a W.B. Yeats poem,” another participant said — a work full of mythology both national and personal. ​“Unless you understand Russian history and culture, you miss out on an awful lot.” Grunloh then revealed that a woman who wrote a book about Tale of Tales was ​“so obsessed” that she learned Russian in order to study the film in greater depth.

“If you have an idea in your head that Russian media is dreary and bleak, this won’t change your mind!” Grunloh half-joked. ​“There are a lot of dark colors and textures.” Yet some effects made the animation glow, as if caught in the brightest sun. And ​“the apple is supposed to symbolize some kind of hope — it’s bright green,” another participant said. ​“There’s all this struggle and loss and difficulty and confusion, but there’s also hope.”

“Maybe the apple is the simple concept that gives you the strength to live. Maybe it’s about how art, or making art and consuming art, is a coping mechanism in a terrible world full of death,” Grunloh said. ​“Kind of relatable these days.”

The discussion turned to the wolf, which some participants found threatening and others comical. Then to other aspects of the film. ​“I still want to know what that fish was — the flying fish at the beginning of the film,” said one participant.

“I’m impressed that this film has inspired so much discussion over the years,” said another. And for all its dream logic and inscrutability, everyone agreed that the film worked on a basic emotional level, of the perspective of a child living through a difficult time. ​“Being a really young child, too young to understand what’s going on,” one participant said, ​“you feel the adults going through tragedy without really understanding it.”

“He was too young to get any of it, but it still makes an impact on you, even if you’re too young to really know,” said another.

Any ​“last little thoughts?” Grunloh asked.

“I could go back and rewatch Tale of Tales immediately,” said one participant.

“I want to go back and watch them all again,” said another.

The next Animation Celebration! happens on Aug. 31. Visit the NHFPL’s calendar to register and for more information.