f i l m j o u r n e y . o r g

I received UK author Clare Kitson’s new book, Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey, this week. To my knowledge, it’s the first book-length study of Norstein, one of the world’s best living animators, and it largely recounts his life as it’s reflected by his impressionistic masterpiece, Tale of Tales (1979), a 28-minute film that has been voted the greatest animated work of all time. In many ways, it’s a painterly equivalent of Tarkovsky’s Mirroróboth are opaque and multilayered memories, with textures and sounds assembled in evocative ways.

Kitson was the animation editor for Channel 4 for many years; she learned Russian and befriended Norstein in order to write the book, and it’s a solid, journalistic overview of the 63-year-old animator’s career to date with a few chapters focusing on the production and reception of Tale of Tales. The book is paperback with glossy stock, and has many beautiful stills, production sketches, paintings, and photographs. While it may not be a penetrating critical study, it does provide a handsome, informative, and badly-needed overview of the artist’s work.

Norstein was born during World War II and spent his childhood in the northern suburbs of Moscow. Though Stalin’s reign of terror softened a bit in the postwar era, anti-Semitism and intense cultural control remained, constraining the young Norstein on many occasions. Luckily, his entry to adulthood coincided with the Soviet Thaw during the more liberal Khrushchev era of the late-’50s, which saw an influx of foreign art and an openness to experimentation. Films such as The Cranes Are Flying (1957), Ballad of a Soldier (1959), and Destiny of a Man (1959) were being produced that invigorated the cinematic milieu. (Unfortunately, history would reverse this opportunity when Russian resources dried up during glasnost at the height of Norstein’s acclaim; he’s still trying to finish The Overcoat, a film he began in 1983 with his wife and longtime collaborator, Francesca Yarbusova.)

Norstein studied at the Soyuzmultfilm animation studio, which began producing a small but progressive body of work for adults during the ’60s. For many years, he worked as an animator for other directors until he began directing his own films during the less-hospitable Brezhnev era of the ’70s, known for banning art and artists that weren’t deemed properly Social Realist. “In one word,” Norstein says, “[the era] was stuffy. We didn’t have enough air. But the strange thing is that when a lot of things outside you are closed off you go inside yourself and find the freedom you need.” Norstein developed a progressively more refined style of multiplane animation using cutouts that produced such internationally venerated works as The Fox and the Hare (1973), The Heron and the Crane (1974), and Hedgehog in the Fog (1975). (All of these films are available on DVD in the Masters of Russian Animation series.)

Like many Soviet-era filmmakers, Norstein managed to get a script treatment for Tale of Tales approved by the censors that he summarily dismissed, producing a much more ambiguous and emotionally complex piece than was planned. Tale of Tales juxtaposes images of innocence and gaiety with images of war and vanishing soldiers, nostalgic visions of childhood with a parent downing a bottle of vodka. The Soviet censors, baffled by the film’s poetry, assumed it had to be subversive and demanded that Norstein make extensive changes. He refused, and luckily, had just been awarded a State honor that made it virtually impossible for the authorities to suppress the work.

Glasnost and the collapse of the Soviet Union kept Norstein out-of-work for many years, but he was finally able to travel, and has spent the last couple decades lecturing and attending tributes to his career. But he also continues producing The Overcoat (his first full-length feature) and occasionally provides short pieces for commercials and title sequences for Russian or Japanese television. Fervently in love with his homeland, Norstein has rejected several international offers to finish The Overcoat abroad, choosing instead to develop the film little by little, year after year, in the country of his birth. Let us hope the film materializes fully formed one day soon.