Yuriy Borisovich Norshteyn is widely regarded as one of the most innovative animators of all time and are best known for his animation Hedgehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales. During his work and the state animation studio, he discovered the films and writings of Sergei Eisenstein, which had a profound influence on him and inspired his own directorial ambitions towards his work. His also inspired by the early twentieth century avant-garde painting. "The painters of that period (1910-1920) enabled me to see the immense artistic potential of animation", he explains. That influenced all his subsequent work.
Norshteyn gained the status of a classic master of animated cartoons upon the release of Hedgehog in the Fog in 1975. In 1984 the international jury in Los Angeles called his Tale of Tales (1979) ‘the greatest animated film ever’. And in 2003 Hedgehog in the Fog received the same sort of accolade in Japan. He has created a special type of poetic animated cartoons, of pure lyricism and developed through a sequence of visual images. Unexpected associations, sensations, reminiscences, fears and dreams are more meaningful than the real plot in his original works.
Besides his brilliant and touching cartoon characters and amazing delicate scripts, one is clearly impressed by astonishing effect of a ‘living’ screen, which is due to a special technology that Norshteyn has elaborated himself. This is the most complicated method of multi-level transposition in the lessons of filming, the images are made as scaly combinations of tiny elements, with each of them are able to move separately for example each of the eyes, lips or fingers. As a result the character, though not looking like a realistic personage at all, but rather bizarre, amusing and irregular seems to be really living and breathing. Norshteyn intentionally insists on imperfect, non-ironed drawing.
No comments:
Post a Comment