Dina Goder. Let's bring everything to life

Let me tell you about our new cartoons. It sounds strange, since cartoons should be shown, not described. But since viewers have almost no hope of seeing new domestic animation, fans of this genre have to be content with the stories of those who have seen it (strongly reminiscent of hunting stories) for many years. And then, you see, you accidentally come across some cartoon on video or in a report about the winners of Western festivals, and the name will come to mind.

The reason is clear: the ninth Open Russian Animation Film Festival has just ended - the only domestic festival focused only on animation and showing in four days everything that has been done in Russian studios over the past year. In fact, this is a purely internal workshop event: animators come to Suzdal to show themselves, see others, compare who is worth what, and discuss professional problems. There are no ordinary spectators in the hall, but it is here that the favorites of the year are determined, which will then fly to prestigious foreign festivals, only here you can see the overall picture of the state of our animation and decide whether it is in terrible decline, as some experts believe, or, on the contrary, on the rise , as others, also respected people, say.

The open festival originated from a long-standing animation workshop in Bolshevo; it was from there that the tradition of “ratings” came from, when all participants (now there are up to three hundred of them) throw notes into a box with the five, in their opinion, best films, and the three directors who received the most votes , are honored as winners. From there came the awards for the winners of the rating - cutting boards personally decorated by the president of the festival, Alexander Tatarsky, with a number indicating the prize place and the autographs of the masters. From there came the whole spirit of friendly gatherings: the obligatory performances of local amateur performances, skit shows, at which middle-aged geniuses of animation and their big bosses perform in the most hilarious form, from there the bickering of the ceremony hosts, who immediately sort things out and drive each other off the stage, an address to the audience " guys,” and frivolous formulations of the merits of prize films. Therefore, no matter how hard the organizers try to “look respectable” and give the impression of being “big”, covering the stage with billboards of sponsors, presenting expensive awards to the main prize-winners and inviting journalists, the Open Festival still retains the homely spirit of a get-together - charming and outdated.

The main pride of the Suzdal festival has always been that it shows all films made over the past year, without exception. And then a few years ago, the organizers suddenly discovered that despite the deep hole into which all of our animation seemed to have fallen from lack of money, the number of films submitted to the competition was increasing. The volume was gained through “home-made products”: having mastered animation computer programs, almost anyone could now make cartoons. No jury can “digest” such a volume, and two years ago it was decided to divide the programs into competition and information, eliminating films “at the stage of mastering the language of animation.” This year, for reasons still unexplained, few films were sent to the competition (although the state has been seriously investing in domestic animation for a couple of years now). And it was decided to abandon the information program. So again all available cinema competed with each other.

So let's get down to business.

Winners

The Open Festival always has five prizes, one of which is the Grand Prix. This time the jury decided to give as many as two main prizes, one of which was resourcefully named “Grand” and awarded to Dmitry Geller for the film “Little Night Symphony”, and the other - “Pri” - went to Ivan Maximov for “The Wind Along the Shore”.

Thirty-three-year-old Ekaterinburg resident Dmitry Geller made his debut as a director quite recently and his first film, “Greetings from Kislovodsk,” began its victorious tour three years ago with the Grand Prix of the Open Festival. That film - a lyrical stream of memories of an accidental holiday romance - was built as a series of flying associations, music, photographs, voices, the sound of waves, rain and the lights of an empty dance floor, which formed a movie reminiscent of Norshtein's "Tale of Tales". Geller's second film, described by the author as "the story of the creation of a single piece of music", again combines drawing with volumetric animation, and is again constructed as a chain of changing fantastic images. Only this time they fit into the story much worse. We see how the cat, after the owner leaves, sits down in front of something that looks like a small puppet theater, and watches the rehearsals going on there, strange figures moving, listening to the orchestra tuning up. An exquisitely beautiful design in a dimly glittering “antique” palette of bronze, brittle lace, smoked glass, flickering candles for some reason evokes the memory of Shemyakino’s “Nutcracker” at the Mariinsky Theater, with its processions of mouse monsters in hats and lionfish. In addition, someone big-headed with a huge mouth and a saber jumps out in the film - like the Nutcracker himself.

Many predicted "Symphony" to win - it is known that in our country vague auteur cinema is traditionally more respected than a coherent story or a funny anecdote. But when it comes not to prizes, but to audience success, it, as a rule, loses even among audiences consisting of professionals. This time too, the rating, which the Suzdal participants value above official awards, placed the “Symphony” only in an honorable fourth place.

Another “grand prize winner” is Ivan Maksimov, a well-known and recognized person in Russian animation, who received both the Berlin “Bear” and “Nick”, the author of many films, videos, commercials with very recognizable characters - funny and touching monsters similar to rubber toys that easily change shape. The current monochrome “Wind along the Shore” (about how residents of a coastal village suffer because of the wind) is perhaps one of Maximov’s best films. Its main character is a girl who goes to the shore to play in the sand with a bucket and shovel and, having met a winged bunny, returns back. It is very difficult to describe this incredibly funny and tender film, full of hilarious gags and sentimental absurdity. You will have to remember a huge fish that is led on a string to be milked (it has legs), and also small spherical creatures that are blown by the wind against the wall of a house (having fallen, they quickly run inside) until it collapses, and then all these living balls burst out of the window. The way in another house a creature that looks like a pig throws it out the window in a draft and from the street only its bare butt, like a sailor, covering the embrasure is visible. And near the house there is a fence on which a cartoon of Maksimov is drawn. The way the girl is carried along the beach by the wind, and she, driving along the sand, continues to busily make Easter cakes. And so on. “The Wind Along the Coast” received second place in the rating.

Of the remaining three winners, two also topped the rating: “About Crayfish” by Valentin Olshvang and “South of North” by Andrei Sokolov. A coincidence of opinions between the jury and the audience does not always happen at the Open Festival, but if it happens, it means that the selected films are truly the best.

The fairy tale “About Crayfish” by another Yekaterinburg resident Valentin Olshvang has already received the main prize of “ Krok ” - an international animation festival, which is held every autumn jointly by Ukraine and Russia. The northern etymological legend about the origin of crayfish, similar to “The Scarlet Flower” and “Medea” combined, has turned into a story about passion, a tender and terrible story, made in a rare and exquisite multi-layer glass painting technique. In a soft, blurry drawing, the story of a village girl who fell in love with a monster - a winged "serpent" with huge almond-shaped eyes and the face of Valentin Olshvang - comes to life. About their wedding among galloping evil spirits and love, full of meek happiness. Warm fairy tales and everyday village details are mixed here with a cruel pagan plot and a darkly muttering soundtrack - scary sentences and spells. The girl’s mother, exhausted by the neighbors’ gossip, dreams of returning her daughter, kills the gullible snake, and then the heroine, in despair, kills her children. Her son turns into a crayfish, her daughter into a wagtail, and the northern Medea herself flies away as a cuckoo. Olshwang's film took third place in the rating.

And finally, the main audience favorite, which immediately received first place by a wide margin in the rating, and the jury prize - Andrei Sokolov's film "South of North", made at the "Pilot" studio. Sokolov, who is not yet thirty, made his directorial debut three years ago with the hilariously funny anecdote film "Latex" about a loving bull. Since then, with amazing consistency, he has been releasing every year a film based on his own script: “Khash” (about how three little pigs boiled Santa Claus, mistaking him for a wolf climbing into a chimney), “Foundling” (about a little cheetah who no one in the desert wanted to consider it theirs). And so - “South of North” - a story about how two northern fishermen - ours (with a fishing rod and oar) and from Alaska (with a computer and a motor) crashed together and traveled in search of a home until they sailed to Antarctica . They got into the stomach of a whale, threw a bottle with a mobile phone into the water, shouted to a huge liner sailing past (to the delight of the animators in the hall, caricatures of Norshtein, Nazarov, Tatarsky and many others were having fun on the deck), caught flying fish. The cheerful and bright drawing, dynamism and a huge number of gags, of course, captivated the audience. We would captivate the audience if we could reach them, but how can we do that?

Applied animation

Nowadays, there are two main ways to reach the audience: cinema (this is only for full-length films, which are practically not made in Russia yet) and television. And on television our cartoons are now almost never shown, because, like in the West, they have switched to a simple and convenient broadcast network, for which the main thing is that the film corresponds to the “format”. The best way for this is animated series, which television is ready to buy in whole packages, preferably 52 pieces (that is, showing one per week for a year) and a length of 26 (or two for 13, maybe 4 for 6 and a half) minutes (half an hour display taking into account advertising). Accordingly, “non-format” and “piece” films have practically no chance of being shown on television, except for thematic programs for those interested (and there are almost none). If you look at the timing of films being made lately, you can see that they are trying to fit themselves into the “format”, but without a “package” and they have nothing to count on.

Since creating a well-functioning, “on-line” production of series is a technologically complex and costly matter, this has not been done here before and only Western and Eastern old series purchased on the cheap were shown on our television. But several new series projects were shown in Suzdal at once (it’s funny that the state also provides money for commercial series). Firstly, the good-natured, but very primitive “Smeshariki” (stories for the smallest about spherical animals - a rabbit, lamb, hedgehog, pig, etc.), which are made by the St. Petersburg team of producer Ilya Popov, are designed for 200 episodes. This project even received a diploma with a strange wording “for the successful start of an animated commercial project that fundamentally opposes the idea of ​​violence on the screen” (either other cartoons do not want to resist violence, or they do this insufficiently fundamentally). And the second, for those who are a little older - “Granny Hedgehog and Others” - with funny and bright drawings by Marina Leskova, but a static and uninteresting script by Mikhail Lipskerov about a baby who was dropped by a stork among the forest evil spirits and goblins with kikimors decide who the baby will be bring up. “Grandma Ezhka” also received a diploma with an even more ambiguous wording: “to the creators who clearly indicated the desire to create a cheerful, bright series with folklore characters.” For the designation of desire, therefore.

It is characteristic that the festival did not seem to notice the next episode of the teenage series "REN-TV" "The Dyatlovs" (our version of The Simpsons - a family of crazy idiots), shown in the competition. And this three-dimensional film, made using new technologies (when the characters’ movements are set by actors hung with sensors, and computers record them), turned out to be, although not perfect, entertaining and dynamic. And quite capable of holding a teenager's attention for 26 minutes - and that's not bad. But the Open Festival is traditionally not very welcoming to outsiders.

However, applied animation is not only about TV series. For our animation studios, these are, first of all, advertising, clips, computer games, educational films, screensavers for television and the Internet, which provide the opportunity to earn money. And although all these custom-made products primarily depend on the taste of the customers, there are also charming films here. For example, this time everyone liked a series of 20-second commercials for “Radio Classic Petersburg” by Alena Oyateva, where, for example, the flight of a mouse with a parachute was accompanied by a fragment from Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus.” And under “The Seasons” the snowman melted, revealing behind him a portrait of Tchaikovsky. There was also a funny St. Petersburg series “300 stories about Petersburgers” - quite simply, in flash technology, despised by animators, showing anniversary jokes like Kharms’s - about Pushkin, Gogol, Stasov and so on.

But the best of all the applied ones were the clips of our former compatriot, and now American Alexei Budovsky, made for the English performer Stephen Coates - fast-paced black and white silhouette scenes, absurd and very stylish. Budovsky, however, has already received awards for these videos both at Krok and in Florida.

Children's cinema

Animation is traditionally considered a children's genre. In Soviet times, this was the case for a long time. Films for adults began to appear only in the early sixties, but there were still few of them. But in post-Soviet times, in the absence of government orders, children's animation almost completely disappeared. And if the authors of hand-drawn films continued to work, then puppet animation, which is not very accustomed to making “adult films,” would have died completely if our puppeteers had not been in demand in the West and had not worked so much on high-quality English “fairytale” and “classical” projects, which, unfortunately, we almost never saw. But a couple of years ago, when the President spoke out in favor of supporting art for children, and separate money was allocated for this, children's cinema began to appear again. Just at this time, Western projects were completed and master puppeteers returned to the fold of domestic animation. In Suzdal, for example, there was a very entertaining and scary puppet fairy tale by Ekaterina Mikhailova “A Gift from the Godmother” (he was awarded a diploma) and a sweet “Girl Lyusya and Grandfather Krylov” by Maria Muat. And also made by Marina Novogrudskaya in the aesthetics of silent cinema, “The Shot” based on Leo Tolstoy’s story “The Shark” - a bit boring, but effective, combining dolls with the magic of 3D animation. And the prize for the best children's film went to "The Music Shop" by Sofia Kravtsova - a hand-drawn story about bugs selling musical instruments.

There were other children's films that were kindly received by the jury, but I must admit that I liked much more than them the unnoticed "A Quiet Story" by Alexei Demin, who not so long ago received a Nika for "Cats in the Rain." This time Demin again shot a gentle watercolor fairy tale - leisurely and full of contemplation - about a bear cub who fell behind his strict mother, dreaming over a bump that looked like a star.

Other favorites

Well, just a few more words about three nice films that will also be difficult for you to find. Firstly, this is a very funny black and white film with deliberately clumsy graphics by debutants Dmitry Elyashev and Mikhail Leypunsky - “Salo”. In it, three evil, lanky pigs, with crutches, wearing black glasses and machine guns over their shoulders, come out of the forest towards the village. There they kick open the door of the house, from where the song “Pidmanula - Pidvila” is heard and shout, holding out their weapons: “Are there any crests?” It must be said that the debutants were given a festival diploma with the mocking wording “The film Salo, which did not manage to receive the Grand Prix at the Krok festival.” I must say, to the credit of the Ukrainian guests from Krok, they laughed along with everyone else.

There was also a cute film “Two Plus One” by Elena Chernova, who for her debut last year “About the Girl Who Found Her Teddy Bear” based on a poem by Sasha Cherny, has already received a basket of awards. This time Chernova composed a joke about “giraffes” - a romance begins between two sly faces on long necks, but a third one interferes with them. After some time of bickering, “the camera moves away” and it is discovered that all three are the heads of the same dragon.

And the last one is “Ivan Juan” by Stepan Biryukov and Konstantin Arefiev - a laconic and funny watercolor story about the fat hero Ivan, unsuccessfully walking from the fork along all three roads, and the thin hidalgo Juan, who is successful in everything, especially with women. In the end, Huang, exhausted by the women in love, fell at the hands of three commanders, and Ivan happily returns home with a beauty in a kokoshnik.

Well, well - maybe something interesting and forgot, but you can’t describe everything. It would be better, of course, to see, but here you can only count on rare shows in the "animels" of the Museum of Cinema. Well, on video colleagues-something also appears there. Today, animation is an art for the unfinished and curious.