Cartoons above the abyss

CROC (in Ukrainian "Step") this year it was not easy to do

CROC (in Ukrainian "Step") this year it was not easy to do

In front of one of the best animated forums in the world-the international festival “Krok”, which celebrated its 25th anniversary, the Hamlet question “to be or not to be” is deprived of abstract meaning. Who could have imagined that the “cartoons” will find themselves in the frontline of a social landscape. Landscaping of art against the backdrop of a merciless battle.

And a nimble ship floats through all historical cataclysms, alternating: one year - along the Dnieper and the Black Sea (in the work of the masters of the world), the other year - along the Volga and Kama (the work of students and beginner animators). Today is the turn of the young. The ship "Alexander Radishchev" left Moscow through Uglich, Rybinsk to Yaroslavl - to visit Alexander Petrov, the Oscar Laureate, who created his studio in Yaroslavl.

The current festival conducted using the Association of animated cinema was supported by the Russian Ministry of Culture. What will happen next is unknown. However, this applies not only to animation. Today, the smell of war is rushing in the air, which the crowd responds so quickly and spurred so quickly. The artist has an allergy to the war, to camouflage ideas, justifying it. At the analysis of the competitive work, the formula was displayed: when ethics overwhelms the aesthetics, ethics turns into an ideology. This happened with the Bulgarian anti-war film "Blood": the scarlet rivers spectacularly fill the streets of the city, but the poster cinema does not touch.

Amazing: throughout the festival week, the ideology as an invisible gesture has been canceled, displaced overboard. The contestants from different countries were dug up to the meaning of the profession daily and everyday, they were looking for the secret of the voiced plastics, reflected on the metaphorical nature of animation, unstable balance of the frame, subtle ratio of art and calculation, trying to derive the unit of measurement of animation.

“Krok” is an island floating along the edge of the world. These 25 years of joint work, friendship, complicity could not pass in vain. Therefore, the joy of communication, generosity and uncompromising in evaluating the work of colleagues and the courage of a normal gesture are especially precious today: to reach out to each other. We, stuck in the viscous climate of hostility, distrust, are in dire need of vitamin of humanity, creative priorities.

And C 900 applications selected 140 films of novice directors. The picture of the world of young people is devoid of infantility, although many works are based on personal experience, but the experience of growing up becomes a telescume through which they look at time and themselves in it. On a hot day, a teenager imagines himself dead ("sunny blow"). Both the “heat of the tender”, and the subtle connection between the “I” and the others are captured on the screen with a fused pencil pattern resembling a watercolor burning in the sun. Filigree miniature Natalia Chernoshova “Return” (prize in the “Student Film” category), made in the famous French school Poudriere, is a scale of scale. The granddaughter who grew up to gigantic sizes comes to a tiny grandmother for the summer. But if my grandmother is treated to her home, like enormous Alice decreases before her eyes - this is a dizzying jump into childhood. In the Israeli “baby”, the puppet granddaughter experiences the death of the grandmother, and the dark blanket on the bed turns into a just filled grave. The “cow in the circle” of the Japanese debutant Yanton Zhu (Grand Prix) is a delicate and wise story of the relationship between a daughter and dad who constantly fools the baby (“you will drink all the milk-you will see a cow at the bottom of the cup”), his crafty is perceived as a betrayal. But when the daughter grows up, he will begin to deceive the growing old father, just not to upset him. Anna Budanova’s “resentment” is a delicate sappress about the materialized resentment, which has grown to the size of the fat curve. The film, which collected a cloud of awards, is crowned with a prestigious prize for the first professional film on Crok.

The action of animation paintings takes place in the Korean Kupalan, reminiscent of purgatory, in the laundry, in the city of thread (Western “Exactly six”), in intensive care (in the “hope” of Lorenz Wunderle, death, like a flock of wolves, hid in the corner of the house and, without looking up, looks at the bed with the child), at the station of the fussy city (in Formolis (in Formolis A hopelessly late passenger hangs on the minute arrow of the treasury hours, catching up with a long time).

The heroes of the films are crying camels; The sailor is an incurable alien on the shore; Harms, crumbling into the letters; excavators - mechanical dinosaurs; Firewood, fat milk and a charming mother, winning the fear of rats ("Bold Mom"). As well as parasitic men, a magnificent multi -leaf, an authoritarian toad, a housewife conducting a kitchen orchestra, a rabbit from a magician hat, boots and even garbage bags. When their “inner world” shakes out of them: banks, bandages, magazines, books - their empty plastic souls will take off to the clouds.

In the works of debutants and students, rhymes with Egyptian poetry were guessed, with Pieta Michelangelo, the painting of Gauguin and the impressionists, the music of Bach and Sibelius, with the secret painting of Perer and Harms. Beginner professionals again and again prove the point of view of the masters: animation in the hierarchy of arts is equal among equals.

Among the features of the program of this year is a passion for the genre. A strong thriller, western, a parody of a soap series, science fiction, detective, mockmentors, drama and melodrama are conquered their place with visual psychedelics. But the genre does not at all cancel the components that are significant for animation - plastic, rhythm, frame composition, metaphors.

If in animation they gave prizes for the best roles, I would no doubt share them between the two Olga. The first is the cashier Olga from the Belgian film by Anna Henink “Cashier No. 9” - a plasticine block, behind which you follow the living elements. I asked the author whether she saw the material of the film “Overcoat” of Norshtein, and found out that the work of the master made an indelible impression on her, wanted to work out a close -up. And the second - a kioskere from the Swiss Kiosk Aneta Melets, like a snail, has grown together with her magazine house, and in it she went to the sunny regions (the best thesis).

The Hungarian debutant Peter Vats in the usual materials saw a semantic paradox. In the film "Rabbits and Deer" he encounters a flat image with voluminous, caring a conflict. How to be friends painted on paper by a rabbit with a deer that suddenly found three -dimensionality? The only way is to look for the path to each other.

Nevertheless, many works spoke about the urgent issues and meanings of today's existence, about the ways of human survival in inhuman space. In one of the films, we see a city from above: a million microdomics with antennas are a million single cameras. In each of them, a person is alone with a TV. Yes, and the grandmother of little Sebastian in the pupils flickers a television picture. Perhaps that is why the city around the child has long lost its colors (Sebastian). The drama of “Women's Letters” Augusto Alllo is the history of the nurse Simon. On the margins of the First World War, he patches the wounds of soldiers with letters of his beloved women. When the “dressing material” ends, Simon tears his girlfriend’s message to the “bandages” to save another life. Excessive sentimentality brightens the rudeness of crumpled paper from which the characters are made.

Anxiety and anxiety also penetrated the sautable Crokovsky carnival dedicated to the favorite characters of the cartoons. Multilingual students tore the sign of the “Customs/Border” signed by anger - and they hoisted the smiling: “CROC” in its place.

Young authors dream of being on an animated ark. German director Robert Lebel, who failed to get a visa in time, caught the ship on his own. I got to Uglich, memorizing one phrase in Russian: "My name is Robert!" Its “wind” - another variation on the topic of the free element - made the harsh male jury led by the famous director Gil Alcabets. The film received a special prize of the jury and a prize of spectator sympathies, and Robert found the title of honorary citizen "Croka".

The picture of the British author Ben Cade is called "Anomalia." In fact, the entire Croka program, and its very existence today, can be called a deviation from the norm. Although no, it is “Krok” with his obsessive passion to listen to the muses when “they say guns” - and it is worth considering the clear norm in the fog of lies and aggression.

Direct speech

Director Andrey Khrzhanovsky :

“Each of our festival is another step towards the realization of the dream, about which Pushkin and Mitskevich said:“ When the peoples of the races of the flight will be connected into a great family. ” Today they love to talk about patriotism. Krok collects patriots from different countries. Patriots of great art, to whom they give all their lives. Radishchev, whose name is our ship, allowed himself to reflect on the tormenting features of power, about the right of power "to tear and burn everything that is disgusting to rule." That is, in the terminology of modern quasiPatriots was an exemplary national traitor. But time puts everything in its place. And the great citizens of Russia, the former "National Defenseists" Lermontov and Chaadaev, Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, Brodsky and Rostropovich are the pride and glory of the country. I would recommend a debate on decisions to politicians to undergo an internship at Krok. You see, in the faceless accumulation of the electorate, they would consider individuals and would like to help art ... by reducing the costs of service.