Plasticine people against ink rain – Weekend – Kommersant

The 16th Grand Animation Festival in Moscow will show Lei Lei’s Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish, a slow and strangely calm story about China during the Cultural Revolution, which the director’s family saw and survived in.

Text: Ivan Davydov

You stumble right away. You try to define a genre and you can’t define a genre. Documentary plasticine cartoon? A family saga with a big story behind it? A big story is presented through photographs, but the photographs show the most ordinary, small people. The characters mention Chairman Mao, the director’s father, for example (and the son of an enemy of the people), dreams that Chairman Mao will meet with his father, talk so that everyone in the village can see and understand what a good man his father really is … But the viewer does not see Mao, nor other creators of great history. The documentary narrative turns into a fairy tale, a big story drowns in the fantasies of a little boy, and the boy himself almost drowns in a mountain river.

Everything is not right. It’s hard to understand the genre. Although in general this is a conversation. A strange genre for a full-length cartoon is a conversation. The director is talking to his father. Turns on the recorder, explains that it is not necessary to speak, but to answer questions. Something goes wrong, they start over. Sometimes the grandfather wedged into the conversation.

But in fact, a conversation is not yet a story. This is just the frame of the story. Lei Lei’s father recalls the 1950s, when he was just a child. Through the eyes of this child, the director is trying to look at the world. The narration is very slow, meditative (the duration of the film is an hour and 43 minutes), so a contrast is created: from a story about those times, and even from such a story, which is conducted with the help of animation, collages, cuts from photos and propaganda pictures, you are waiting for a drive, dynamics, but none of that. Family history is a slow business.

Conversation is a framework. He is also unhurried, the director has to ask leading questions, draw memories from his father. And often he answers simply: “I was then very small, I don’t remember.” And the brightest moments are – as it should be in family history – not at all grandiose events, but insignificant details that are important for their own. “Your grandfather had a bicycle. With headlight. There were no lights on the roads in the countryside then. He fell off his bike twice. Two fractures. He was not a good cyclist.”

There is a family photo album. This is also part of the frame. Children run from photograph to photograph across the album to tell their father the terrible news: their mother has died. She died and turned into a silver bird. Or is the silver bird the plane that the hero’s half-sister is learning to fly? Or a children’s airplane, now and then bursting into the frame?

There is reality – these are black and white photographs, pages from magazines, footage from the chronicle. There is a life that is not equal to reality. In their photographs, instead of faces, they have funny plasticine faces. Multi-colored plasticine people live in a black and white photographic world, and various miracles happen to them. Their history is wider, richer than the fragmentary memories of two old men who went through repressions. Their story is made up of metaphors.

Here is a trap. The deliberate primitiveness of the animation provokes relaxation, visually the world of the cartoon seems to be arranged quite simply. But it takes a fair amount of attention to take into account all the director’s hints so as not to miss anything important.

And then you realize that you are not a spectator, you are a reader. “Silver Bird and Rainbow Fish” is a visual poem. Here the hero’s father (and the director’s grandfather) approaches the bed on which his wife has just died. And the bed begins to disappear, dissolve, crumble with dust … Here the father finds a new wife – and a rainbow fish jumps into his son’s arms from the lake. By the way, spoiler: if you are waiting for a fairy tale about an evil stepmother, then in vain. She’s kind. “She was a very good cook. We ate a lot of different tasty things.” And for Lei Lei, she is the beloved grandmother.

Kindergarten is a birdcage in which a boy is locked up. “Cultural Revolution” – a terrible ink rain, dirty black drops that fall from the sky and break multi-colored plasticine people into pieces. And in the place of his native home – also, of course, multi-colored – a dirty black sea begins to splash.

And perhaps the key point: faces, faces, multi-colored plasticine faces. And suddenly the living invade the frame – that is, strangers to this world, that is, omnipotent human hands. Huge hands. And the faces begin to crumple, crumple, and a shapeless lump is obtained.

Incomprehensible mountain monsters are chasing a family of exiles, the bridge from which the hero, a little boy, falls into the river, turns into a dragon – where in Chinese history without a dragon? Grandfather and grandmother are arguing behind the scenes: did he escape himself or was he pulled out by the peasants who came running to help? “Myself!” Grandma proves. “Chairman Mao said we should learn to swim, and I was a good swimmer,” my father laughs. He learned to swim, and he, the son of an enemy of the people, taught the inhabitants of a mountain village to sing the Internationale. Funny and touching.

Terrible times end, the family is stronger than history. As if tired, Lei Lei hurriedly leafs through the album. And he sees himself – a little fat-cheeked boy. “Did we let you down?” the father asks. “It’s okay, I can tweak a few things in the movie.” But nothing rules, it lets us inside a lively conversation. Life is a blueprint.

“Did you like grandma’s face in my film?” asks the grandson of his grandfather. Grandfather hesitates, and we feel that grandmother is somewhere there, next to him. “Not. I remember her not like that. She wasn’t like that. She was smart and beautiful, your grandmother.”

Cinema “Illusion”, November 6, 16.30

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