New times, new rules. Most of the children’s program of the festival (including the famous Cartoon Factory) has been transferred online, and the Stop Coronavirus videos have been announced in the competition. But all these are trifles in comparison with the opportunity to see the latest masterpieces by Mikhail Aldashin and Andrei Khrzhanovsky and listen to a live lecture by Yuri Norshtein.
big screen
The cartoon factory, where children were taught all the stages of creating a real cartoon and which for several years was the main event of the festival, of course, did not benefit from being transferred online. And in general, the offline children’s program (and the festival is specially planned for the autumn school holidays) is kept to a minimum. It’s a real pity: on the big screen, both the Finnish “Moomin Valley”, and “The Famous Bears Invasion of Sicily” based on the fairy tale by Dino Buzzati, and even new interpretations of the famous children’s songs from the “Multipelki” series look completely different.
And yet, cinemas received their portion of cartoons, albeit a truncated one. The festival opened with a Japanese 3D-picture “Lupin III: The First Movie”. This is the story of a dashing adventurer who looks like both a young James Bond and a Japanese pop star. The Japanese Lupine is a distant relative of the gentleman robber Arsene Lupin, invented in France over 100 years ago. But this version is more reminiscent of “Indiana Jones” or “Lara Croft” – Lupine III is hunting for treasure with a group of associates, including ninjas and an obligatory beauty. Maybe this is not the most outstanding picture in terms of animation, but one hundred percent audience hit. By the way, “Lupin III” will be repeated for an encore on November 7th.
Another conditionally children’s premiere of the festival is The Childhood of Troubled Martha Jane Cannery. Here, too, the nationality of the heroine does not really matter, a cartoon about a girl – a legend of the Wild West was created in France and Denmark. Martha Jane in Trouble is a new feminist Mulan: the main character prefers cowboy pants to skirts, and taming wild mustangs to quiet domestic pleasures. By the way, the troubled Martha Jane really existed and became a legend during her lifetime. Out of respect for the tender age of the viewers, the authors omitted some details of Martha’s real biography – her alcoholism, not very successful marriage and old age in a brothel where she did laundry.
Girls who choose Martha as a role model do not need to know this at all.
In general, strong girls and women are definitely new heroines of the festival. Little Red Riding Hood from the French cartoon “Beware of the wolves!” so fearless and self-sufficient that wolves bypass it. The heroine of Aldashin’s new cartoon “The Princess and the Bandit” falls in love with a bully and renounces royal privileges. And Princess Tiffany from the cartoon “Three Thieves”, based on the fairy tale of the same name by Tom Ungerer, prefers a dangerous life with highway bandits to an orphanage.
Even the two almanacs announced in the special program of the festival – “For Women Only” and “Body, Gender, Sex and Other Problems” – are clearly dictated by the feminine agenda. The first contains cartoons about menopause, abortion, the desire to get pregnant in any way, and even about excessive lactation. “Body…” is an even more adult program aimed at an 18+ audience. Judging by its content, classic fairy tales with a handsome prince and a perfect marriage in the final no longer work. A modern woman loves whoever she wants, not disdaining even a maniac-murderer. And this is not a metaphor: the short film from the foreign contest “Just a Guy” tells the real stories of girls who wrote letters to prison for serial killer and rapist Richard Ramirez. With one of them, Ramirez eventually married.
Documentary animation is another modern trend that the selectors have packed into three programs. They are divided thematically: the search for identity (“Who am I?”), the unity of the place (“The Genius of the Place”) and “Our Stories” (Russian animation of the last couple of years). Animadoc is an ideal reflection of the picture of the world here and now, in the era of a pandemic: closed borders, on the one hand, and the total removal of all taboos, on the other. Sonya Gorya, the author and heroine of The Plague Habitat, tells how she spent the spring of 2020 in a locked apartment that she turned into a teacher’s room, boudoir and dance floor. “Cartoons from the police” in the most exaggerated style tell about the origin of injuries in citizens detained by the police. And “Monstera: Patience!” and completely gets into the head of the OMON fighter dispersing the rally.
One of the most obvious uses of animation these days is in music videos. This is very noticeable at the festival: there is “The Idiot” to the song by Vyacheslav Butusov, and “Game” to the composition of Ivan Dorn, and “It gave off heat” by Aigel, and “Soup” – a video for a song from Leonid Fedorov’s new album “From the sky and water”. “Children’s Album” – a video sequence for music of a different kind. The title refers to a series of piano pieces by Tchaikovsky (and the cartoon of the same name by Inessa Kovalevskaya in 1976), but in reality it is a concise encyclopedia of world music for the little ones. Animators from Russia and Belarus illustrated short musical fragments from baroque to jazz using different techniques. The venue for the show was chosen accordingly: “Children’s Album” can be seen on November 8 at the “Philharmonic Hall-2” in the Olympic Village.
Living Classics
And yet the main audience of this year’s festival are adults. It is for them that most of the offline programs are designed, and a gala premiere has been prepared for them – “The Nose, or the Conspiracy of “not like that” Khrzhanovsky.
Khrzhanovsky and Norstein are two living classics of Russian animation. Both can be seen at the festival. Norshtein, the author of the immortal “Hedgehog in the Fog” (“Hedgehog, by the way, turns 45 this year), will read a “Lecture on Freedom” on November 6. And Khrzhanovsky (“The Glass Harmonica”, “The House That Jack Built”) presented his “Nose” on November 4 at the Tretyakov Gallery.
When Norshtein took the tale of Sergei Kozlov as the basis for his “Hedgehog”, he did not particularly focus on the original. Khrzhanovsky and the screenwriter of The Nose, Yuri Arabov, did the same with Gogol to tell their personal story about the relationship between the artist and the government, about the possibility (or impossibility) of compromise, and, of course, about self-censorship. The “nose” in the title is an anagram of the word “dream”, on which three storylines are based: Major Kovalev’s dream from Gogol’s story, Mikhail Bulgakov’s dream about meeting Stalin, and, finally, a dream about how Shostakovich’s opera was banned. Anti-formalistic rayek. Meyerhold, Stanislavsky and Eisenstein move freely between these dreams. Yes, and Khrzhanovsky himself, who voices all the roles, from Stalin to Shostakovich.
Photos provided by multfest.ru