Translated material
King of the Mountain of Gems
Remembering Alexander Tatarsky
Today is 40 days since the death of one of the best directors of Russian animation - Alexander Tatarsky . During these days, they remembered a lot about him, because he was a fireworks man, who scattered countless ideas around himself, started new projects that at first seemed crazy, a famous storyteller, a generator of pranks and jokes, who illuminated and changed the lives of other people. They remembered Tatarsky’s childhood in Kiev among the clowns for whom his father wrote texts. About his animator youth, when he, together with his constant friend and co-author Igor Kovalev, went from the Kyiv studio to conquer Moscow. About the epoch-making “Plasticine Crow” - a film that changed the ideas of a huge number of people about animation, the fate of which at first was not at all as prosperous as it seems. About the creation of the "Pilot" studio, about students and films, noisy television projects like "Lights Out" and, finally, about the grandiose cycle "Mountain of Gems", for which he convened the best directors of the former Union to work on it.Today we are publishing the memoirs of sociologist Alexey Levinson about our joint work on Tatarsky’s forgotten television project “Attic Fruttis.” And the memories of directors of different generations who consider themselves students of Tatarsky - Valentin Telegin, Dmitry Naumov, Mikhail Aldashin, Alexey Alekseev, Andrei Sokolov, Sergei Merinov - about the cheerful, friendly and endlessly creative atmosphere created by their teacher, which was always present at the “Pilot” " It is not for nothing that now all of them, no matter where they work and no matter how far from Russia they live, continue to repeat: “My home is “Pilot”, “Pilot” is the best studio in the world.”
These memories were heard on May 16 at the first of three evenings in memory of Alexander Tatarsky in the Assembly Hall. Today, the last evening of this cycle will take place there - “The Plasticine Crow” and others...,” a retrospective of the director’s films.