Animators laughed at the headlines in the media

At the 28th Open Russian Animation Festival, held in Suzdal, everyone involved in the creation of cartoons gathered to see the work of colleagues, to present their own, made over the past year. The festival has become much younger. Of the masters, only Yuri Norshtein comes on it. Queues of novice animators line up for him for autographs on his own drawings and books. This is a separate sacrament and an opportunity to get an audience with a genius, albeit for one and a half to two minutes.

In the works of the young – sheer pain and despair. They perceive reality more sharply. It has always been so. And if a year ago quarantine-pandemic stories were of particular interest, now there are very few of them, they are of little interest to anyone. Time flies fast. New circumstances of life sweep away everything that recently seemed important.

One of the most sought-after characters was the bear. It often happens that without saying a word, animators suddenly turn their eyes to one hero at once. It could be the dominance of the teddy bears we all played with as kids. Now the bear is big, real, sits in a cage, plays the balalaika, instead of a den, winters in the bottom of the summer stage. Bears are colorful, sensitive and kind, able to really make friends. In the movie “Shhh!” Nina Bisyarina, he is a sufferer. Until they started building the track, the bear feels at ease in the forest, eats red berries with appetite, stringing them on his claws – an excellent manicure is obtained. But then a man invades his world, construction equipment makes noise, a stream of cars rushes by. Where should the poor bear go? And he goes to the park, sleeps there under the snow-covered stage. And then – the unknown.

More than once appears and bony with a scythe. In “Music of a Summer Night” by Alexander Vasiliev, the driver did not immediately make out who threw himself under the wheels, and therefore strictly asked: “What are you, a collective farmer? Can’t wait for the next world? He put me in a car and drove along the night highway with a fellow traveler named Death, without knowing it. Other passengers appeared along the way – sister Alyonushka and brother Ivanushka, who had already become a kid. And in the sky the astronaut marvels at them when they fly to the stars. Whether to God, or to death – think what you want. And we can’t live without space, as Konstantin Bronzit rightly noted, who once called his Oscar-nominated cartoon, “We can’t live without space.” Slava Ushakov’s The Dark Side also features an astronaut and a mysterious planet, a wolf howling at the moon, and a spaceship that has failed.

Liza Skvortsova is the record holder for the number of paintings. She works fast and hard. A year ago, she had several works based on Russian and Polish poetry, and before that she was increasingly attracted to literary primary sources. Now the headlines in the media were in her field of vision. They would have been enough for more timekeeping. But the one that turned out is huge by the standards of animation. Whole 15 minutes. Lisa found all these pearls in the public domain: “Grisha the deer, having got to Omsk, became a man”, “Omsk roommate dug up his predecessor in the garden”, “In the Irkutsk region, a bear stole two guns from a hunter, and broke the third one”, “Kuzbassovets did not could steal a tractor and ride it in the garage.” Another Kuzbass resident suffered by eating all the pickles of his ex-wife, judging by the title. And some bear made 18 acrobats cry on the track.

Liza Skovortsova called her film “Omsk”, as the inhabitants of Omsk are called. But geography is not limited to this region. Each headline comes to life, develops, thanks to the imagination of the director, into amazing pictures that illustrate the essence and carry away into distant distances. It turned out very fun and funny, not at all evil, but with great irony.

The most ardent reception, accompanied by shouts and applause, was received by “Dear Passengers” by director, artist and animator Max Kulikov. This is a story about a train that is not clear where it is rushing. It contains the whole country, representatives of various social strata and classes. Marines with a guitar celebrate the eternal holiday, pour bitter. They were not very lucky with a fellow traveler – a devout old woman. But even she will not withstand their pressure, she will join the drink, she will only substitute a glass for a new portion of the “fiery serpent”, and when parting, she will cross her fellow travelers with an icon. The fat uncle, in front of the passengers, takes off three or four layers of trousers and underpants, lays out pickles, fried chicken, and eggs. And now the whole compartment turns before our eyes into a butcher’s shop with hams and sausages hanging from the ceiling. In the next compartment, there are more than a dozen children resembling tadpoles. Everything is moving around there. Children kindle a fire, and at stops, like a swarm of bees, fly out onto the platform. A train rushes across the country, and a handsome horse, snow-white, with a black mane, gallops outside the window. The fields sparkle with emerald green. Life is good! But her madness knows no bounds. Galina Golubeva shot the 14-minute film “Millions of Scarlet Roses”, slightly changing the name of Alla Pugacheva’s hit, which we will never hear. But the picture was taken from a song, inspired by it, although it is filled with completely different music – Verdi, Rossini, folk chants. And then a train rushes – a toy, made of plasticine, and also into unknown distances, like Gogol’s troika. And what is happening around – and the pet is about to give birth, and there will be a new life, and the deceased in the coffin is still moving, and plasticine roses will bloom, and there will be so many scarlet petals that you can’t see anything behind them – one solid, head over heels beauty. Othello on the stage of the toy theater painfully long strangles Desdemona. And the sleepers become a symbol of infinity, and the Russian bear (again!) will appear for a moment. And the plasticine train rushes and rushes into the toy distance. .

Another train is featured in Svetlana Tikanova’s documentary animation “The train rides in me…”, based on childhood memories. The author tells how a family, but not one, lived in a carriage at the track repair machine station of the Far Eastern Railway. On the screen are old black-and-white photographs. The adult heroine recalls behind the scenes that she does not remember her father, but remembers how they left him in a carriage called “The Box”. Then railway workers, repairmen moved with their relatives, children from one station to another, studied in carriages, ate and slept. Being a seven-year-old girl, the heroine remembered how the train stopped somewhere and did not go anywhere else. “I grew up. The train rides in me … ”, – the grown-up heroine admits.