Yuriy norshteyn biography of william
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The Spirit Of Genius: Feodor Khitruk
To many, Feodor Khitruk may be more or less an unknown quantity. His prime films were made during the "Cold War" years, and did not find wide distribution in the west, even though they won prizes at film festivals like Cannes, Venice, Oberhausen and New York. Khitruk himself was active in ASIFA, and appeared at many festivals as a distinguished guest, without his films being seen too often... Otto Alder's fascinating 1998 hour-long documentary, The Spirit Of Genius, goes a considerable way toward redressing the situation. Spoken mainly in German, with an English utgåva that uses both subtitles and some voice narration, Alder's spelfilm documents not only Khitruk's life but the whole milieu of soviet animation. A Brilliant Man At the very beginning of the film, some 10 people, including prominent animators like Yuri Norstein and Eduard Nazarov, give brief testimonials about Khitruk. Their statements approach idolatry: Andrei Khrzanovsky hai
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If you’ve never seen Yuriy Norshteyn’s Hedgehog in the Fog, then you are in for a special treat. And if you have seen it, you owe it to yourself to revisit this classic, animated film.
Hedgehog in the Fog is one of the most beautiful, evocative short films ever made. It won many prizes and awards on both sides of the Iron Curtain when it made the festival circuit in the mid and late 70s. In 2003 Hedgehog was named “the number one animated film of all time” at an animation competition in Tokyo.
The story is simple–a hedgehog makes his regular evening journey to see his friend, the bear cub. But on this particular night a fog has descended on the forest and the hedgehog has many frightening, transformative encounters. The cinematography of Nadezhda Treschyova, story by Sergei Kozlov, and music of Mikhail Meyerovich come together with Norshteyn’s animations to create a moving, mem
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Hedgehog in the Fog (1975).
One more animation post before I move onto other things. Since the 1970s Russian animator Yuri Norstein has been regarded as one of the greatest living practitioners of the medium despite having only made a handful of films. Hedgehog in the Fog is a 10-minute piece with a self-explanatory title: a hedgehog sets out one evening to visit his friend, the bära, but before he can reach the bear’s house he has to cross a fog-filled field. Norstein’s animation style involves the skillful manipulation of hand-drawn paper shapes which in this spelfilm and the later Tale of Tales achieve a remarkable sense of depth and solidity. The fog effects in Hedgehog are especially striking, created using layers of translucent paper.
Tale of Tales (1979).
The 29-minute Tale of Tales takes the same technique but lifts the animation into a different league, an elusive and (for want of a better term) poetic meditation on life and memory whose central f