Polygon

The festival “Animation in the Oscar nomination” was held in Moscow

I don’t know how many people have heard about the Oscar Nominated Animation festival. Judging by the fact that the hall of the 35 MM cinema remained half empty at almost all screenings, few heard. Meanwhile, the program, consisting of almost a hundred high-quality short films made over the past 50 years, most of which have never been shown in Russia, was worth the noisy advertising and rush of demand.

They say that animation has become fashionable, and this fashion, which in recent years has gone beyond the boundaries of children's entertainment, was pushed by animated blockbusters. Now even the very specific Japanese animation has crowds of fans, and it’s impossible to get to the British animation sessions. That's all true, but this fashion here lives on a starvation diet - there is nowhere to watch real original animation. Not only can you not see it on TV, but you cannot buy it either in license or from pirates. This is a very piecemeal product, unprofitable for pirates. It’s somehow strange to talk about the fashionability of something that no one has any idea about. Unless they are very tireless amateurs, scouring the Internet day and night, downloading gigabytes of cartoons for themselves and watching on small screens in terrible resolution what is designed for a cinema and should amaze with its picturesque subtleties and plastic nuances. By and large, it’s the same as listening to Rabinovich perform the part of Caruso.

And so they brought us a great program, an ideal educational program, after which you understand differently even the animation that you have known for a long time, including the old Soviet one. Of course, you shouldn’t think that Oscar is a perfect selector. His list includes more than just masterpieces, and the winning cartoons are often just as opportunistic as those in feature films. But unlike the awards of Russian academies, these nominees together make up a representative picture of the movement of world animation. And if you ask any of our animation masters - from Khitruk to Norshtein - to compile a list of the best foreign cartoons, it turns out that most of these films are included in the Oscar series. We are talking about short film, because this is precisely the testing ground for animation, here new ideas are developed, new technologies are tested, and those formal plastic searches that move art take place here.

For those who have become interested in animation recently, when most of the cartoons that can be seen are computer 3D, there were still key films at the festival that we had at least heard something about. First of all, the American studio Pixar, starting with the film “Luxo Jr.” (1986) about table lamps - father and son, where the plasticity of dolls created on a computer was worked out (by the way, since then the lamp has been included in the studio’s logo). In "Jeri's Game," which won an Oscar in 1997, a hilarious old man played chess with himself using a false jaw, inflating himself and pretending to have a heart attack. In this film, the studio worked on the texture of clothing and human skin - it turned out very convincing. In the film About the Birds (2001), the main thing was to draw feathers, and the incredibly funny story about scheming birds trying to drive away a large, simple-minded bird ended up being nominated for an Oscar. Here everything was built not on gags, but on amazing animation that captured the essence of the characters, especially in facial expressions. There were other Pixar films on the program - "Mike's Car" with the heroes of "Monsters, Inc.", the gloomy "One Man Band", nominated for an award last year. But all this is known one way or another, as are Nick Park’s plasticine series about the eccentric inventor Wallace and his dog Gromit (the festival’s first children’s program). The second children's program included films that were unknown to us, but very charming. Two English ones with wonderful hand-drawn animation are especially good: in the Christmas “Snowman” (1982), the snowman came to life and at night flew with a boy straight to Santa Claus for a gift (I remembered Soviet New Year’s cartoons with somewhat more collectivist and less poetic plots). And also “Famous Fred” (1997), where Joanna Quinn told the story about a fat lazy cat who, it turns out, became a pop star at night and, like Elton John, gave stadium concerts organized by an impresario - a guinea pig.

Children's programs, naturally, looked the most complete. In others, formed according to a thematic principle, the current went up and down, and it was necessary to instantly change from more popular plots, often verbose, similar to picture books, to cinema that was almost avant-garde, formal or impressionistic. It turned out that the skeleton of a film can be anything - the image is carried and developed by history, music, or a flow of words, as in films built on recordings of real children's chatter, jumping from plot to plot. Or even just a “rut” - the American John Hubley received an Oscar for the film “The Pit” (1962), where what on the screen looks like an argument between two workers about cataclysms is, in fact, a classic “rut” of no one , and Dizzy Gillespie and George Matthews, developing the plot as a jazz theme.

Among the films that our masters call among their favorites, the program included “Street” by Canadian Caroline Leaf - a monochrome “animate painting” (a technique where they paint on glass with oil paint, changing the image directly under the camera). The story is about a boy waiting for the room he was promised after the death of his sick grandmother. Here, children's impatience, fear, conversations with friends and echoes of adults' concerns add up to a fluid, brownish atmosphere of old memories. “The Thieving Magpie” by Emanuele Luzzati (1965), as well as his “Pulcinella” (1973; both films with music by Rossini), is a combination of enchanting picturesqueness with movement, subject to the laws of music. “The Search” by Tyrone Montgomery (or more simply “Quest”, as the type of computer games is called) in 1996 was a puppet parable - in it a sand man tried to get from one inhospitable world to another, but each next level turned out to be more terrible and dangerous. So from all the worlds full of clanging iron, it fell into its original desert as a handful of sand. And another German puppet parable, filmed by the Lauenstein brothers (1986), was called “Balance”, and the world in it was a flat disk hanging in the void, on which several completely identical people had to maintain balance so as not to fall.

Canadian Norman McLaren is considered one of the main avant-garde artists and experimenters in world animation, but his least formalist film, Neighbors (1952), received an Oscar. This is also a parable about good neighbors who started a real war, arguing over whose territory a flower grew (in the finale, the insidious flower forked and decorated the graves of both). Here McLaren filmed the actors, but using the method of time-lapse photography, like shooting dolls. Now this technique is fully accepted and is considered animation, but in the early 50s, “Neighbors” was still in the department of live-action short films. Another Canadian experimenter, Ryan Larkin, was also on the program. His film “On the Move” (1969) seems to be just an alternation of different gaits (characters of varying degrees of conventionality walk in front of us one after another), but it greatly influenced the movement of animation and caused many imitations. As a tribute to Larkin, who after his triumph left the profession and became a drug addict, Chris Landreth made the film “Ryan,” which won an Oscar two years ago. The director filmed interviews with Larkin, his ex-girlfriend and producer and transformed the footage into surreal animation - some hand-drawn, some fantastically altering a living face using 3D computer graphics.

From domestic animation, as we know, only the painter Alexander Petrov is included in the Oscar list; he was nominated for an Academy Award three times - for “Cow”, “Mermaid” and “The Old Man and the Sea”, and received a prize only for the last film, in 1999 year. (True, among the nominees there is also another director with a Russian name - Evgeniy Fedorenko, but there is no point in deluding ourselves here; he is a Canadian animator.) There are no other directors whom we consider national pride, but this fact does not humiliate them at all, but simply says that Oscar has other guidelines, and our producers cannot yet reach it. All known versions of the lists of “the best cartoons of all time” contain enough of our films. It would be nice if we organized festivals based on these lists. And it would be even better if it were possible to see the art of animation in the mode of not a one-time injection, but a systematic acquaintance. Then real animation cinephiles would emerge, from whom a wave of both cheerful fashion and meaningful interest would flow.

Dina GODER