This year Russian animation celebrates its centennial. As a tribute,
RBTH is featuring short clips of pioneering films by Russia’s masters
(starting from 1912 to 1940).
The first 30 years of the industry was a rich era of great innovation
that is little known outside Russia—watch the first part of our series,
and the magic will reveal itself. One of the first things you may notice
is that these films, from the avant-garde to Soviet propaganda, were
directed to adults as well as children.
In the 1990s, film historians discovered that the first Russian animator
was Aleksander Shiryaev (1867-1941), the ballet master of the Mariinsky
Theater. Russian director Viktor Bocharov stumbled upon the films of
the ballet master, who taught Balanchine at the Mariinsky. “You don’t
have to be a ballet fan to appreciate the technique that Shiryaev
pioneered at the dawn of Russian filmmaking,” Anna Kisselgoff wrote in
The New York Times. He created the world’s first-ever puppet-animated
film (1906), which showed 12 dancing figures. In one scene alone,
historians record the puppets in more than 7,000 different positions.
Vladislav (Ladislas) Starevich was a biologist who began to explore ways of using
his embalmed insects on film. His short, “The Cameraman’s Revenge” (1) is a
warm-hearted but edgy comedy about a family of cockroaches. His film
“The Beautiful Leukanida,” another fractured fairy-tale of the insect
kingdom, was seen and heralded outside of Russia. Starevich became
famous for his world of puppet-like (as well as life-like but presumably
dead) insects who cooked, dreamed, drank, and made films, all with the
use of wires.
Animation took a hiatus during and after the turbulent era of the
Communist Revolution. But by the late 1920s, the Soviet Union became
known for its large studios, which included schools of animation. One of
the most remarkable films of that time is “Soviet Toys” (2) by Dziga Vertov
and "THE Interplanetary Revolution" (3) by Zenon Komissarenko, Youry
Merkulov and Nikolai Khodataev. Both were made in 1924 and were fueled
by the fever and propaganda of early Soviet reforms. (An online reviewer
called “Interplanetary Revolution” a blend of Bolshevik ideology and
H.G. Wells science fiction. One of the best moments shows capitalist
vampires draining workers of their blood.)
Not all animated films were so politically charged. Youry
Zheliabuzhsky, Nikolai Bartram in 1927 created a spare comedy called
"The Ice Rink" (4), a whimsical look at a series of social blunders on the
ice.
Ivan Ivanov-Vano, who is considered to be one of the most
significant directors in the history of Russian animation, created in
1933 a film "Black and White" (5) with the help of Leonid Amalrick. The
hard-hitting piece is an effort, through animation, to examine under a
harsh light the history of blacks in America, especially the South. The
animated short focused on repeating images of discrimination, lynching,
imprisonment and execution.
In 1932, the congress of Soviet
writers proclaimed that writers should work within the genre of
Socialist realism. Avant-garde animation was diminished and aesthetic
experiments were off the agenda. For the next twenty or more years,
Soyuzmultfilm, as the studio was called after 1936, became the leading
studio in the Soviet Union, producing an ever-growing number of
children's and educational animation shorts and features.
While some of the spirit of the founding years never returned, Soviet
animation was not without experimentation. It also developed its own
trajectory and singular beauty quite different from American and
European schools of animation.
Aleksandr Ptushko was educated as
an architect and worked as a mechanical engineer; he invented an adding
machine that was used in the Soviet Union until the 1970s. When he
joined the puppet animation unit of Mosfilm in the late 1920s, he found
an ideal environment to merge his mechanical and artistic ambitions. He
became internationally renowned with the Soviet Union’s first
full-length animation film released in 1935 called "The New Gulliver" (6)
This film mixes puppet animation with live acting. Jonathan Swift’s
novel has a more communist bent here, and Gulliver’s operatic rhetoric
can be hard to bear - though the Lilliputians giggle and faint at his
antics.
The animation itself is magnificent, featuring hundreds
of puppets. Their faces are deeply expressive in close-ups, and Ptushko
provides highly detailed moments—like when the young tavern maids faint
at the sight of Gulliver and must be revived with water. The film
brought Soviet cinematography to new heights. Ptushko became the first
director of the newly founded animation film studio for children, but
soon after left to devote himself to live-action cinema.
After his emigration following the October revolution, animation in Russia for years came to a standstill. Only by the late 1920s Soviet authorities could be convinced to finance experimental studios. These were typically a part of a bigger film studio and were in the beginning most often used to produce short animated clips for propaganda.
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