Translated material
Travel diary
The animation festival "Krok" has ended
There is one story that should be addressed when talking about young animation at the Krok festival, even after it ends. This is, in fact, drawing. Not only classic hand-drawn animation, but also those where the artist’s work is complexly processed on the computer, and those where the transfer technique is used, the details for which are also drawn by the artist (and then he moves them, as in appliqué, either on the computer or by hand) , and oil painting, and sand drawing - in a word, drawing of all kinds. Because there were many wonderful, very different and even quite original artists among the young animators, and among the winners there was also a clear majority.I'll start with those that didn't receive any prizes, but seem worthy of attention to me. Among our students, the already awarded “Ballad of the Barber” by Ekaterina Kolosovskaya, who, adapting Aubrey Beardsley’s poem, stylizes its graphics. This mannered drawing turns out to be very effective in movement. To animate the main character, Catherine used the “éclair” technique, where a living actor is outlined, but the effeminate barber-murderer in the film is decoratively surrounded by almost static other characters. Her classmate Natalya Surinovich, on the contrary, drew a very light pencil and also black and white film about a clumsy ballerina who learned to dance from her reflection. This picture was sweet with its sketchy simplicity, lack of frills and charming movement of the heroine, who was gradually gaining skill. Hungarian graduate Bella Sederkenyi also drew her film “Orzoya” quite simply, but with cinematic wit. The young heroine of her painting suddenly discovers that she can now only walk upside down, on her hands. The story of a man who sees everything upside down is an allegory of outsiderism. Orzoya loses friends, work, interest in life, and then decides to accept herself as changed and again finds herself needed by everyone. She finds an interesting job (only she can find and get what people have long lost under sofas) and friends. And in the end, under one of the sofas, the girl finds her love - a guy lying there, an equally loser.
Another graduate student, a graduate of the British National School of Film and Television, Elena Pomares, in the ironic style of English book illustration, made the film “The Chicken Coop” about a fox who, for the sake of warmth and satiety, went to work in a cafe and gradually became an ordinary waiter from a small predator with a tucked tail and trimmed claws. . It must be said that Elena’s script did not look very clear (this is a common problem with young cinema), but the drawing and details seemed so witty that the audience was constantly smiling. Another film that was not awarded was also received with a bang - “Lumo” by Berlin graduate student Antje Hein. The title of the picture, according to the author, means both the state of the molecule and the name of the marker, and in the film, from a small circle, a molecule, a real human hand draws funny creatures on a sheet of paper, turning one into another. The relationship between the author and his drawing is the same popular plot in animation as the chain of endless absurd transformations of creatures who themselves are not happy about the transformations. But this is pure animation, and this is impossible in any other form of art, so the inventiveness and humor of the authors of stories like “Lumo” bring them constant success.
On the contrary, the exquisite and rare technique of free-flowing animation, used by French debutante Mathilde Philippon-Aginsky, always gives the film a poetic, meditative atmosphere. The painting “Woman of the Lake” turns a fisherman living on the shore into a spirit and personification of water. When the scorching sun dries up the lake and everything that inhabited it dies, the woman launches the last living fish into herself. This looks like an act of fertilization, as a result of which water flows out of the heroine’s womb, refilling the lake. Some physiology of this story unexpectedly looks in the gentle and always conventional “sandy” execution, but nevertheless this film is impressive.
Well, the last of the unawarded films that should be mentioned is “Miramare” by a Swiss graduate from Croatia, Michaela Müller. The story of happy children who accidentally left the territory of a developed resort beach and found themselves in the thickets on the outskirts, where the life of illegal immigrants flows, is painted using a rare beautiful technique of “oil on glass” in a somewhat impressionistic, blurry manner and is full of tension. The viewer is not very clear what exactly the danger of this random adventure was, but the feeling of unaccountable anxiety does not leave him.
Well, now let’s move on to the winners, at least those of them who were not able to be talked about in previous reports from Kroc. It’s worth starting with the painting “One More Time!” graduates of Alexander Petrov’s workshop, which he organized three years ago in Yaroslavl. (This film received a prize from the festival sponsor of the World of Childhood company, and most importantly, the Alexander Tatarsky “Plasticine Crow” prize “For aerobatics.”) At first, Petrov’s school was conceived as a four-month course - a permanent Russian nominee and Oscar winner. During the filming of his last film, “My Love,” he felt a shortage of professional animators who could work in his signature “oil on glass” technique. But the training lasted from several months to a year and a half, and for another year and a half, six graduates made their common three-minute film, which they finished literally before Krok. This small picture is a cheerful and rapid chain of memories about one day of childhood, which the old man remembers when he listens to the record with “Rio Rita”. Ice cream maker, hairdresser, pioneers with acrobatic pyramids, gas masks, scissor sharpener, cyclist, photographer - you name it. To be honest, it seems that signs of very different times were thrown together here, but the film was made at such a cheerful and charming dance pace, with such unexpected humor in the image and tricks of Petrov, who was always prone to drama, that it was difficult to resist his charm.
The main prizes of the Kroc jury are located at three levels. The first is awards by category. Here they give in each of the categories - student, diploma and debut - two diplomas and one prize (the prize is a copper bell plus 3 thousand dollars). The second level - two special jury prizes (a bell plus 4 thousand dollars). And the third - one Grand Prix (bell plus 5 thousand dollars).
Among those awarded with diplomas in the first, student category, there were two films that were very simple in visual design, but cleverly conceived by the designer. Already won many prizes “On a scale” by Marina Moshkova, a student at the St. Petersburg University of Film and Television. In the story about how a bird destroyed the world to save her chick, she used the style of a technical drawing. The whole story is drawn with a ruler and compass, even the dimensions of the parts are indicated, which makes it possible for witty inventions (when a bird needs to unscrew a nut that is too large, it beats off the first number in a double digit size with its beak, and the nut immediately decreases). The second film, “The Bird,” by our former compatriot and now German student Gerhard Funk, is also extremely conventional. The characters in his silhouette painting are something between a bird and a plant. They look like birds, but when they fall to the ground like seeds, they immediately take root. The hero is torn from the root by the wind, he is carried everywhere, thrown first to one bird, then to another, he disturbs everyone and cannot properly take root anywhere. The allegory of emigrant life looks clear, but not too frontal and pictorially very elegant. The winner in the student category is the Japanese film “Chewing Gum Boy,” which we wrote about in the first report from Krok, although painted in delicate watercolors, it looks energetic, fast-paced and so full of fantastic changes of perspective and transformations in the child’s fantasies that it's literally impossible to keep track of him.
Among those awarded in the second, diploma category, we did not talk in our reports about only one film - the film based on Jack London “The Law of Life” by Rishat Gilmetdinov, a St. Petersburg graduate of the workshop of Konstantin Bronzit. The London-style spare, gloomy film about an old chief who is left to be devoured by the wolves by a tribe of Indians is especially good for its details and rough, but stylistically accurate and picturesque image, which moves with appropriate heaviness in the transfer technique.
In the third category, dedicated to debut films made after graduating from film schools, two diplomas went to hand-drawn pictures of a radically opposite nature. “Brick” by the Swiss Marina Rosset, in a very simple but expressive half-children’s drawing, tells a very understandable woman’s story. Her characters met, fell in love, and the man immediately decided to build a huge castle for his poor beloved. He built it and built it, completely forgetting about the girl, until she, waiting for him on a stump, completely disappeared under the snow. The film that received the second diploma - "Ritual" by Polish graduate Zbigniew Czaply - was more difficult to understand. The young director wanted to show how a person, repeating the same actions day after day, like a ritual, gradually turns into an animal. Zbigniew's ink drawing looked incredibly sophisticated; it was not easy to understand its rapid and whimsical transformations, but the very movement of the lines and spots was mesmerizing.
And finally, the prize among young debutants was taken by a Russian participant - director Natalya Mirzoyan, who has been working in St. Petersburg for several years at Smeshariki and has only now made her first film, The Childhood Tree. Natalya made a film about children's fears using the transfer technique with a dark, very rich design, a little reminiscent of kitschy beautiful illustrations for scary fairy tales. It is clear that the clearly overloaded story about a boy who, in search of a missing bear, falls from level to level of his sleep, was Natalya’s reaction as an artist to the monotonous and overly simplified tasks that work on a fun children’s series poses to her. I wanted something scary and complex - both in the drawing, and in the construction of the plot, and in the direction. This, by the way, is very common among young directors working on commercial TV series - from the original films that they make “for the soul”, it is clear that they are the ones who are so oppressed by working “for money”.
Now about two special prizes that highlighted opposite pictures, which demonstrates the breadth of tastes of the Kroc jury. The tragic film “The Lighthouse” by the Bulgarian graduate student Velislava Gospodinova was shot using the technique of adaptation based on a poem by Jacques Prévert about a keeper who turned off the lighthouse so that birds would not crash on it, but thereby caused the ship to crash. The jury was impressed that poetry and drama were created in the film without a single word, only with the help of expressive animation and Rachmaninoff's music. The second special prize winner, the film “Little Boy and the Monster” by two debutants from Germany Johannes Weiland and Uwe Heidstschätter, on the contrary, looked very “conversational”, and the hand-drawn animation made on a computer was very simple. But the story itself about a boy and his divorced parents seemed so observant and sweet that this film could not be ignored. The child talks about what is good and what is bad about having monster parents, and at this time his mother and father loom behind him, looking like the scary hero of Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.” It gradually becomes clear that the indifferent mother, who allows everything, secretly sobs and tears photographs into shreds, has become a monster after the divorce, just like the menacingly growling father. By the end, mom, who has found a new friend, again turns into a flirtatious girl, and dad, as the wise child says, “will need a little more time.”
And finally, about the best film of the festival, winner of the Grand Prix and the Audience Award - the film “Madagascar: A Travel Diary” by French debutant Bastien Dubois. The kind of unanimous admiration that this film evoked among the Krok participants is truly rare: the jury admitted that they came to the choice of the main prize winner of the festival instantly and unanimously, and in the rating of the professional public, Bastien’s film received twice as many votes as the film that followed it on the list. And even the maximalist Yuri Norshtein admitted that this is the first film made using computer technology, which he considers a real creation of the artist. The story of this film is as follows: a 24-year-old graduate of the famous film school Supinfocom decided that he wanted to make a film about an exotic journey, having heard about the unusual ritual of “swaddling the dead” in Madagascar, he began to raise money for a long trip to southern Africa. The preparation took a year, and the journey itself took ten months. During the voyage, the young man, who only had enough money for two plates of rice a day, lost 10 kg. And all this time he drew everything he saw, using different techniques - paints, pencils, inks, pastels, and scanned the drawings, storing them in the computer’s memory. When he returned, he spent a long time looking for a studio that could support him, and then made a film. As a result, his painting, which looks like the pages of an artist’s diary coming to life, breathes such freedom, such love and admiration for a gradually recognizable country, so easily moves from quiet contemplation to noisy fun, observes people and nature with such humor and tenderness that it seems ideal travel story. The same thing that neither enthusiastic travelers with their hundreds of photographs, nor visual films ever manage to achieve.
Perhaps Bastien Dubois’s film is the best point for a long story about today’s young animation, which is gradually moving from depressive and inarticulate self-expression (which is what student and debut animation of past years looked like) to understanding the world around it. In any case, this is evidenced by the very successful program of the latest Krok.