Yuri Norstein

Yuri Norstein – I believe that it was a reference to Russian animator, Yuri Norstein, in regard to The Book of the Dead that triggered my addition of Masters of Russian Animation (Part Two) to my Netflix queue. Norstein was named in connection with that Japanese film where he is credited as a “guest animator” – his name appears in the credits as a staccato burst of ABC’s amidst the otherwise delicate Kanji titles. Five of Norstein’s short films appear on this DVD – “The Seasons,” “The Battle of Kerzhenets”, “Fox and Rabbit,” “The Heron and the Crane”, and “Hedgehog in the Fog.” The latter film is said to be the great Japanese animator Hiyao Miyazaki’s favorite cartoon. (There are about five other short films on the DVD, some of which are quite beautiful, but all rather pretentious or, worse, whimsically surreal.) Norstein specializes in stop-motion cut-out animation. His work is distinguished by three-dimension effects created by using several layers of glass, all inlaid with exquisitely designed and painted transparencies – “Hedgehog in the Fog” is particularly distinguished by its blurry, impressionistic atmosphere effects, apparently created by filming the stop-motion action of the hedgehog beneath stacks of glass decorated with abstract filigree to represent fog and snow. Norstein’s films on this DVD are all about eight minutes long and were made in the first half of the seventies. The pictures are exceedingly beautiful but essentially static – each frame is gorgeous but the movement of the figures in their miniature environments is hyper-stylized and robotic. This induces a dream-like effect, but it is one that the viewer perceives as a kind of eerie motionlessness that twitches spastically at its focal point. (The genius of Japanese and Russian animation lies in the creation of fantastically elaborate and gorgeously painted still frames – this is exactly opposite of the rubbery, wild elasticity of continuous unfurling motion that characterizes American animations – Hollywood cartoons are full of spectacular, smoothly articulated, but completely hallucinatory kinetic effects. In Japanese and Russian animation, indifferently drawn cipher-like figures stutter from frame to frame in luminously painted and completely still landscapes.) In “The Battle of Kerzhenets”, Norstein and his collaborators have extracted hundreds of figures from Byzantine and Russian icons and, then, set them moving in massed formations – the effect is spectacular, like stained glass somehow come to life, Eisenstein’s battle on the ice from Alexander Nevsky, but also curiously static, even when the motion is signified to be frenzied and violent. All of these films left me cold – which is, perhaps, a serious defect in my aesthetic response. Norstein’s variety of stop-motion animation was an anachronism when he began his work in the late sixties – in this era of CGI animation, these pictures are completely archaic, a kind of hand-craft approach to animation that affords the strongest possible contrast to the way films of this kind are made today. His work is like a book prepared by a scribe painstakingly illuminating the letters one by one on vellum – it’s astounding that someone would have the patience to do this, but, perverse, as well, and, probably, pointless. I suppose that most 10th graders with a reasonable PC could equal (approximately) many of the effects that Norstein spends years perfecting by hand. Yuri Norstein is famous for the fact that he has been animating Gogol’s The Overcoat since about 1980. The project was initially halted by the Soviet studio because Norstein, an obsessive perfectionist was working too slowly – the Soviet system collapsed but Norstein continued his work when funds were available from other sources. I think Miyazaki, for instance, has financed bits of the work and his labor as a guest animator on The Book of the Dead apparently allowed the Russian master to continue with his work on the Gogol film. The finished movie will be 65 minutes long – in 2007, after 27 years of work, Norstein was able to show some low-resolution footage amounting to 25 minutes of the picture. His photograph on Wikipedia suggests to me that he will die long before this project is completed. When the film is finished, it will be a magnificent anachronism that only a handful of people in the world will be capable of appreciating.