Translated material
Aerobatics
The echo of the international animation festival "Krok" was heard in Moscow
The international animation festival “Krok”, which sailed on a ship in Ukrainian waters in October, came to Moscow with its “echo” and staged a large screening of the winners at the House of Cinema. Usually “Echo of Kroc” is a screening of winning films, but this time it was different, and there are at least two reasons for this. One thing is clear - some of the winning films were recently shown in Moscow at the Great Cartoon Festival, and, therefore, there was an opportunity to glean from the huge Krokov program more new things that the capital’s public had not yet seen. The second reason (they talked about it a lot on the sidelines) is that this year’s main laureates turned out to be extremely gloomy, which means that the parade of winners would have been deeply depressing.Everything is understandable: the chairman of the jury this year was Igor Kovalev, who had lived in the USA for a long time - once the closest associate of Alexander Tatarsky, who with him filmed the legendary “Plasticine Crow”, and “Last Year’s Snow Was Falling”, and much more. Kovalev, who together with Tatarsky invented many funny films, himself makes films that are always alarming and gloomy, where even a sarcastic grin is extinguished by painful forebodings. The fact that Kovalev would make an appropriate choice, unlike the traditional set of Kroc winners, where there is usually a lot of fun and good-natured sentimentality, could have been predicted. Krok participants were amazed to learn that at the festival, which brought together an extraordinary bouquet of world animation stars, including domestic ones (already loaded with awards, “My Love” by Alexander Petrov, new films by Konstantin Bronzit, Ivan Maximov, etc.), Grand Prix - Louis Cooke’s black grotesque “The Pierce Sisters”, filmed at the British studio “Aardman”, received the prize. It was the only winning film shown at Echo of Croc.
“The Pierce Sisters” is a brutally and stylishly drawn story about two old, ugly sisters (one huge, fat, the other small, wrinkled and nimble) who live on the seashore, fish and suffer from loneliness. Once they pulled out a choking fisherman, went out, touched by his beauty, and when he woke up and saw their terrible faces, he rushed screaming back into the sea. Then the offended sisters found the swollen, grinning corpse of the ungrateful man, cut him up like a fish, and turned him into a smiling stuffed animal. We sat down to drink tea with us - and then we saw that the lonely old women’s table was full of such stuffed animals...
In contrast to this story, Echo showed a film by South Korean director Chan Hyun-Yun, Daddy Wolf, shot with gentle humor (he received an award established this year in memory of Alexander Tatarsky - “For aerobatics”). To the wolf writer, who has secluded himself in the provinces in order to create a masterpiece, a certain girl suddenly brings a little girl and, without listening to objections, announces that she is his daughter. Then the intelligent, thoughtful wolf gets more children - a rabbit and a turtle, and his life is completely subordinate to his children.
If we talk about the memory of Tatarsky, then what did the most for her at the festival was the series of hilarious videos “Traffic Safety”, shot at the Pilot studio by Elena Chernova and Alena Oyatieva in the style and with the characters of films about the Brothers Pilots, once invented by Tatarsky and Kovalev . This was, of course, not an auteur film, but a social advertisement, but the stories with the Koloboks deftly following the rules and the foreign villain who always breaks them, were scattered with a whole cascade of gags and looked no worse than a real movie.
Striving for uniqueness, the organizers, in addition to road videos, chose only two works by domestic directors for “Echo,” and even those were made in foreign studios. The two-minute, very funny “Polar Pit” by Alexey Alekseev (filmed in Hungary) tells about stupid owls who have fallen into a snow hole and don’t know how to get out of there. And the whimsical black-and-white film “Three Love Stories” by Svetlana Filippova, shot in Germany, combines artistic and documentary photography of the beginning of the century and painting of that time with her own naive drawings, telling how the poet searched for love.
In general, despite the enormous opportunities that technology provides today, there are still a lot of aesthetic black-and-white, very simply drawn films, and they are still highly valued. Among the favorites of the festival was, for example, the witty and paradoxical Lapsus by Argentinean Juan Pablo Zaramella. In it, a conventionally drawn funny nun moved along the white field of the sheet towards its black half. And on a black background, all that remained of her was her white face and hands, which again jumped out onto the white half of the sheet and turned into something completely different. For example, round eyes became the breasts of a naked woman. So the nun, disassembled into black and white details, jumped from a white background to a black one, trying to become herself again.
Indeed, there's nothing funnier than playing with film conventions - even in supposedly believable 3D animation. “Echo” showed a three-dimensional film by Belgian Benoit Ferumon Dji Vou Veu Volti about a troubadour singing these very words under the balcony of a supportive princess. Since the Flemish dialect is not very well known, during the singing the credits I love you appear, then the letters get tired of the lover singing the same thing, they begin to form the words “Shut up” and other rude things, then they turn into a frog, a little man, and get into trouble with the troubadour fight, etc.
One of the main favorites of the festival audience was the very funny film “Sleeping Betty” by Canadian Claude Cloutier, also shot on a medieval plot. The picture is without any tricks, but there are so many funny gags in it that the audience at the “Echo of Croc” simply crawled out of their chairs, seeing what the dejected king was doing, trying to wake up the sleeping beauty of his daughter. Numerous romantic cliches are parodied, classical paintings are quoted, musicians, wizards and handsome princes rush around, but the girl has nothing to do with it. Until the alarm clock rang on the nightstand. This film did not receive any prizes... Well, to hell with them, with prizes, everyone knows what a lottery it is. The main thing is that the films can be seen, and then everyone will choose their own.