| The 13th international animation festival “Krok” ended in Nizhny Novgorod The Krok festival, this year dedicated to debuts (see “Vremya Novostei” on August 4) , announced its laureates. Of course, victories at an original animation festival will never make a director a celebrity among the general public, as happens with the creators of “big” cinema. And it’s pointless to advise readers to pay attention to talented debutants (there’s nowhere to watch their films). But on the other hand, most likely it is these names that will determine the movement of animated films in the near future, and then - who knows? - maybe you can see their films too.
At the “debutant” Krok, prizes and diplomas are awarded in three categories: the first - student films, the second - thesis, the third - the first professional film shot outside the educational institution. In addition to them, there is an “out-of-category” Grand Prix, a prestigious special jury prize, an award for the best film school program and an audience award, which is considered especially coveted at Krok, because not only all five jury members vote for it, but also almost 300 animation professionals -- festival participants.
This year, the festival awards showed especially clearly that there is a huge distance between the cinema that is called audience cinema - cheerful, energetic, with a catchy rhythm - and that which is valued at festivals. Among the films that would be received with a bang in any cinema hall - hilarious anecdotes, full of animated gags (and such films were on Croc, the French film school Goblen is especially famous for them) - there were almost no prize-winners. Except that the honorable mention diploma “For Professionalism” in the first category went to Goblen’s film “House”, shot by five students - a fast-paced, hand-drawn story about how an old woman was angry with a neighbor who was singing too loudly in the shower, and how, because of her anger, the whole house was destroyed.
The jury was not interested in stunts. It gave the main prize to three French graduates who shot a very sophisticated film “Overtime” using the technique of 3D animation, secretly dedicated to the recently deceased puppeteer who worked with puppets - the author of the famous “Muppet Show”. In this picture, rag frogs, similar to Kermet, find their creator dead, but do not understand what death means, and try to make him live as before. They stage a huge concert where the dead hero conducts them, only now he is a puppet himself, and the frogs support his head and move his arms with puppet canes. The jury gave its special prize to another diploma student, this time a British one, for his hand-drawn painting “A Bus Ride and Flowers in Her Hair.” Former Israeli Asaf Agranat directed a slow, lyrical story about a boy traveling somewhere on a bus. A meeting with a dog, summer views outside the window, a girl with long hair sitting in front - all this plunges the dreamy child, and with him the viewer, into a state of meditation and causes dizziness.
The main prize in the first, student category went to the Czech “Scene from the Life of Antelopes,” which Edita Kravsova filmed based on Prever’s novella. The cute black and white story, drawn as if by a child’s hand and voiced by a child’s voice, really looked touching and lively, but the festival program, where there were unexpectedly many such primitivist “children’s” stories, showed that this was a win-win technique - they all enjoyed success with a room full of professionals.
In the second category (graduate films), from which the Grand Prix with a special prize was also recruited, the award was given to the ingeniously imagined film by Malcolm Sutherland from Canada, “Bird Calls.” In it, listening to messages on the answering machine, a person heard only the chirping of birds and wrote it down in a notebook in strange squiggles, as if they were signs of a special writing system. And then these hieroglyphs came to life and began to tweet themselves. It was all very interesting, especially from a formal point of view - trying to somehow visualize sound, its pitch, timbre and rhythm, has been around as long as sound animation.
And finally, the prize in the third category, for the first professional film made outside of school, went to the Bulgarian Theodor Ushev, who lives in Canada, who made the film “Bocher Tower” - an energetic, frenzied tribute to Russian constructivism and especially Tatlin, where to the music of Sviridov circles, corners and stairs of constructivist fantasies multiply, build, collapse and rotate.
As you can see, Russian debut animators did not receive a single main prize, and this is understandable - the best Russian debuts were clear, well-told stories, did not pretend to be pioneers, did not use complex language and did not work with whimsical associations. But there were especially many Russian films among those who received incentive diplomas. In addition, the Moscow school-studio “Shar” received a special jury prize for the best film school program. And what is especially significant is that in the audience rating, three of the top five films were Russian. Of the foreign films on this list, only “Overtime” (5th place) and “Bus Trip...” (3rd place) were present - the same ones that received the main jury awards. “Our” here was a “children’s” black and white story “Sara’s Tale” (4th place), where the girl made up things on the fly about what happened to her, the janitor, the dog and the crows in winter, when it’s easier to fly than to run in the snowdrifts My mittens get lost and I don’t feel like cleaning the snow. In second place was the very funny and bright “Shish” by Marina Karpova - a drawn fairy tale about a roguish “little brother” who emerges victorious everywhere, the only film from the famous “Mountain of Gems” series that was entrusted to the debutante. (The fact that “Shish” did not receive any other prize at the festival seemed strange, and it seemed that the authoritative jury considered this very professional commissioned work to be “out of category” at the debut competition).
Well, the main audience award and one of the jury diplomas went to the film, which has already collected an armful of debutant awards at the Russian animation festival in Suzdal, “Caution, the doors are opening” by Anastasia Zhuravleva, a graduate of the Shar studio school. The charming picture about the Moscow metro, where buttons, pins and reels operate, is received by spectators of any, even the most arthouse and snobbish of animation festivals, just like any other hall full of “simple-minded” spectators. That is, with delight. Which once again makes the debate between “audience” cinema and “festival” cinema meaningless. Dina GODER, Nizhny Novgorod |
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