Translated material
Two bears met in the forest
Domestic animation is in danger of dying
This story doesn't start now. All animation studios that had contracts with the state to produce cartoons have not received a penny from the Ministry of Culture since the end of last year. No one really knew why this was happening, to all the cries of studio producers for help, officials did not answer anything intelligible, and on the sidelines there were rumors that the recently created Cinema Fund had sent an audit to the Ministry of Culture, and while the checks were ongoing, all the accounts of the main customer were frozen, and when they defrost - God knows. Actually, this plot applies not only to animation, but also to all film production, but for domestic cartoon studios, which are not at all similar to foreign large-scale “animation production factories”, but rather resemble handicraft workshops that do not have reserves “for a rainy day”, will lose the only source of financing is fatal. The “black day” lasted for eight months; studios began to close and dismiss workers in the spring. In April, a video message from director Irina Litmanovich, who was filming the film “Home Romance” at the Saratov Aquarius studio, went viral on the Internet. Others died quietly. There were letters from Yekaterinburg that the Snega studio was packing its things and renting out cartoon machines. All this was reminiscent of the mid-90s, when directors and artists from closed studios went abroad in droves, and those who could not, went into other professions. It took a long time for domestic animation to recover after this, and, in fact, it still hasn’t recovered.In the current “dark days”, the largest studios held out the longest, of which, perhaps, only the employees of the St. Petersburg “Mill”, affiliated with the Selyanovsk “STV”, continued to accurately receive their salaries and work on all their projects, primarily on the next “heroic ” in full length, the release of which is scheduled for the new year. Another St. Petersburg major, the Petersburg studio, was forced to freeze some of its projects, but retained its employees with all its might. As studio director Nadezhda Kuznetsova said: “I give everyone three thousand rubles a week so that they can eat and get to work, there is no money for more.” But “Petersburg” has a large production surrounding “Smesharikov”, and the animation budget has always included approximately 30 percent of the studio’s own money, so now its employees live on this 30 percent.
At the main Moscow studio “Pilot”, production also began to wind down in the spring, famous directors left and looked for work on commercial projects, although there are few of them in these times of crisis. The film crews of the last few episodes of “Mountain of Gems” lasted the longest; in the end they worked for free, until the elevator in the building began to be turned off for non-payment of utility bills (the studio is on the tenth floor). Here the producers decided to freeze all projects and dismiss the workers. Two films from “The Mountain” were almost finished at this time, and three more were in the middle of work. The director of one of these films, plasticine maker Sergei Merinov, wrote in his hearts a waste of his native studio on his blog, calling his post “Victorious Mortification.” It was this entry in the Internet diary during the eventless summer days that raised the information wave, which ended on Tuesday with a round table at RIA Novosti “Russian animation between the market and government orders,” where famous directors and producers were invited.
To be honest, all “round tables” of this kind are similar to one another: the conversation immediately turns into endless lamentations about the lack of money, the future of unfortunate children and the death of culture, as well as hopeless disputes between representatives of “pure art” (from which this time Harry Bardin and the Pilot studio) with a commercial one (this role was played by the heads of the Space of Ideas studio, which produces the weekly animated parody show “Cartoon of Personality” for Channel One). In the “center”, between arthouse and commerce, there remained St. Petersburg residents: Sergei Selyanov from the Petersburg studio and Smesharikov artistic director Anatoly Prokhorov.
Among the main proposals involved in the dispute were: the need to introduce quotas for showing domestic cartoons on television (Selyanov reasonably objected that with our meager cartoon production, domestic cartoons would only be enough for three days of showing on ten channels, filling 15% of the screen time) and changing the law , which now prohibits advertising in children's programs, making everything children's for the channels a waste of time. It is clear that the channels do not want to buy domestic films for normal money when they can stream cheap old Western TV series. The round table participants imagined that if TV channels were interested in showing domestic animation, they would begin to order it themselves, as is happening all over the world, and the studios’ dependence on the state would decrease. To this, Anatoly Prokhorov recalled that the old Soviet standards, which we still use today, when a 10-minute cartoon takes nine months, are not suitable for a commercial product; in the West, the new television standard is 26 minutes in two weeks. For our small studios working with classical animation, this is impossible, except in “motion capture” technology, where they use actors with sensors, as in the program “Cartoon Personality”. But in this case, quality also dies, and “animation is an art,” as Harry Bardeen persistently reminded, whose full-length “The Ugly Duckling,” for which money was raised all over the world, will be released in September.
In general, even after the “round table” it was clear that even if, as promised, the situation with the old debts of the state will improve and the studios that have already closed will be able to return to work, life will not go on as before. Already now, the price of a minute of animation that the state was willing to pay has been reduced by almost half, and then as a result of the new law on the allocation of basic money to the eight main film companies, it will become even worse, since among the animation studios, except for “Melnitsa,” there is no one with these leaders not connected.
Probably, the strongest will survive, as Pilot and a number of other studios survived in the 90s, taking on any commercial orders, in particular, cheap and somewhat humiliating service to foreign projects, which is how young animation companies in third world countries make money. But in order for not only people and studios to survive, but also domestic animation as an art, it would be necessary that those crumbs of public money that will still be given to support domestic cartoons be distributed in accordance with clear, sensible and meaningful criteria, but they are not there now. To give priority support to debuts and student films, which have become noticeable in recent years. And finally, so that the opportunity to make a new film with public money is primarily given to those who have shown their professional class in previous work. In the meantime, we see that directors who make shameful films that gather dust in the studio archives after filming is completed, because even the most modest domestic festivals do not want to show them, are once again receiving state support, and applications from leading directors who have the main festival prizes are being received from Ministry of Culture refusal. But with today's system for assessing applications for government funding, it is impossible to count on anything else.
On the government procurement website you can see how the Unified Expert Commission, consisting of seven people, makes its decision. Each submitted application is assessed against a variety of criteria, with a cunning calculation formula including the contract price and the film's production time, along with the "artistic and cultural significance of the work", which is determined by five points. The first point is “the social significance of the project, including the affirmation of civil and moral ideals in society,” and the last point is “the relevance and demand of the project by Russian society” and for each of them, experts must give the application from 1 to 20 points. As film expert Larisa Malyukova, a member of the Unified Expert Commission, explains, the names of the future directors of these films are unknown to experts, probably to exclude lobbying, but in any case, the bulk of applications is a monotonous stream of series on the theme “two bears met in the forest,” which are not easy to evaluate in these categories. At the same time, according to the general director of the Pilot studio, Lev Bubnenkov, the Ministry of Culture officially announced that it does not want to continue financing the cycle of fairy tales of the peoples of Russia “Mountain of Gems,” which was recently called the standard. When the project was launched, the state promised to support 104 episodes of the project conceived by Tatarsky (that is, two years of weekly screening), and now it has been announced that the 52nd film should be the last. And, as the artistic director of “Pilot” Eduard Nazarov says, eleven new applications that have been lying dead weight in the former Goskino since last year have no chance (among them there are the developments of our best directors, for example, “Silver Hoof” by a wonderful director and artist, a student of Norshtein , Svetlana Filippova). And applications from unknown “bears” continue to arrive.
Those who want to try to find out on the ministry’s website what kind of films are participating in the competition in order to understand for themselves the assessments that the commission makes, can only read the list of applications, which looks very intimidating. The options are few, on the one hand - “highly spiritual”: “A series about the search for spiritual values”, “A series for children about the victory of good over evil”, “A series for children about eternal values” or “A film about the spiritual and moral education of the younger generation” , and on the other - “relevant”: “Series for teenagers about innovative entrepreneurs”, “Series for young people about the world of computer technology”, “Educational series for children dedicated to innovative technologies” (all based on the results of the last tender in mid-July) .
However, perhaps these conversations are empty: after the last tender held under the old law, the producers were waiting for a new competition of applications for subsidies from the budget that will be distributed after the G8 gets theirs. The terms of the competition were recently published, but only full-length films are listed in the “animation” column. If this is indeed the case, then the situation is bad: without the author’s short film, which has always been the glory of domestic animation, today we have nothing to show either the world or ourselves. And there will be no debuts in the future.