The 50th anniversary of the cartoon “The Nutcracker” was celebrated in Pushkinskiye Gory

Experimental director Boris Stepantsev used combined shooting in animation

For the second time, the Pushkin Mountains festival of animation and literature “Pushkin and…” is being held. Its program includes film adaptations of works by classics and modern writers, as well as cartoon authors.

The festival opened with a 27-minute film adaptation of “The Nutcracker” by Boris Stepantsev, created at Soyuzmultfilm in 1973 based on the 1816 fairy tale “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” by Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann and the 1892 ballet by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Boris Stepantsev is a classic of Soviet animation and an experimenter. He made his debut as a director in 1954 at Soyuzmultfilm, where he had previously studied at courses for animators. He directed the first Soviet wide-screen cartoon “Murzilka on the Sputnik”, was the first to use electrography in Soviet animation in “The Kid and Carlson”, carried out video combination of an actor with a hand-drawn scenery in “Assol” and combined filming in “The Nutcracker”. We all know his cartoons “Vovka in the Far Far Away Kingdom”, “Kid and Carlson”, “Carlson Returned”, “Tsokotukha Fly” and many others.

The jury, led by animation director and producer Maria Muat, evaluates 30 competition films, some of which last just over a minute. The youngest participant of the festival was a 15-year-old student of the art school named after. V.A. VataginaDaniil Stein, who directed the film “Dubrovsky: Behind the Scenes” about a boy who writes a school essay.

Pushkin is an independent character in several competition films at once: “My Pushkin” by Yuri Tomilov is a comedy in the form of children’s drawings in a school notebook, made during a literature lesson. “Pushkin in the Woods,” by VGIK student Sofia Diaz Gonzalez, is based on Oleg Egorov’s “Tavel Novel” about monuments to the poet in Moscow that come to life. “Pushkin and… Mikhailovskoye” by Ekaterina Gavryushkina consists of the short stories “Pushkin and Tsar Boris” and “Pushkin and the Mill,” where an unusual adventure happens to Alexander Sergeevich during his exile in the Pskov province.

Maria Muat presented her retrospective, gave a master class, and talked about puppet animation, which she has been doing for many years. Several of its adaptations were shown: “The Snow Maiden” based on the play by Ostrovsky, “The Girl Lyusya and Grandfather Krylov” based on the fairy tale by Sasha Cherny, “Zheltukhin” based on a chapter from “Nikita’s Childhood” by Alexei Tolstoy, Pushkin’s “The Snowstorm” and others.

Animator and director Maria Yakushina, who was a member of the jury, presented her sketches at the exhibition center together with animation artist Nina Vinogradova, who has a major retrospective here: “Poor Liza” based on the story by Karamzin, “The Barber of Seville” based on the opera by Rossini and the comedy by Beaumarchais , “The Captain’s Daughter” based on Pushkin’s story and others.