At least the studio, where he lives as well as works, is his to arrange as he likes. Not that he owns it. This is capitalism; he pays rent like anyone else. It keeps him young, he thinks, having to chase his living. He has hung bells, many bells, from the low ceilings. Every surface in the small dark rooms is cluttered with books, lamps, dried blossoms, postcards, art: his sketches, other people’s sketches, children’s sketches, charcoal portraits of nineteenth-century clerks, religious icons, tubes of paint, a large wooden camel, a travel poster from Seville, hangers from Marks & Spencer, a magazine photo of a Brazilian soccer fan with her breasts spilling out, tiny scissors, glass bottles, an old record player, a small green chair, stills from his films, interesting stones, rolls of masking tape hung on hooks, a spotted frog, and hedgehogs, dozens of hedgehogs, painted and molded and carved; people keep giving him hedgehogs because they love his most famous character, the little yozhik who goes to visit his friend the bear cub and finds himself lost in a fog. “Enough hedgehogs!” he roars. In his bathroom, he has taped a sign reading PIRATE’S CORNER—Pirate was his last, and deeply loved, dog—to the wall over a phalanx of miniature samurai on a glass shelf. The cup beside the samurai is full of paintbrushes. In the center of the paintbrushes is a single tube of toothpaste.
On Saturday mornings, he opens his studio to admirers, who come to buy his pictures and his magnets and the children’s books he has made from his films. Tania takes payment in cash; she prints receipts with an adding machine. Most of the time, his Saturday crowds are small, but sometimes—on the day he released his memoir, for instance—the lines stretch around the block. Occasionally they include foreigners; his friend Hayao Miyazaki, the legendary Japanese animator, sometimes compliments his films in the press, and that brings him some attention, Miyazaki being so well known. But mostly they are Russians, of all ages. He tells them jokes. With a flourish, with an exclamation mark, he signs their books.
Tania has worked for him for more than twenty years, and she loves to goad him, so while their Saturday callers flip through the racks of prints, she will sometimes begin explaining loudly what a terror he is to work for. Sometimes, she says, businessmen come to see him, professional people in suits and ties, and offer him money, as much as he needs to finish The Overcoat. “And whenever this happens, Yuri Borisovich begins to TREMBLE. ‘Don’t worry about anything,’ these men say. ‘We’ll take care of everything.’ And Yuri Borisovich goes into the other room, and he paces, and he hides. And after a while, he comes into the hall like THIS”—Tania imitates a stomping, glowering ogre, puffing out her cheeks and crossing her eyes—“and he POINTS at me, and he POINTS at the door, and he shouts: ‘Tania, YOU handle this!’”
Tania Usvayskaya: his former student. A talented artist in her own right, as he tells anyone who will listen, who has published books of cartoons in Japan. Only rarely, and only if he leaves the room, will she deliver the other part of her speech, about his unsurpassed skill as an animator. “Yuri Borisovich’s hands are not like other people’s hands,” she says. “They move differently. And Yuri Borisovich’s brain is not like other people’s brains. He thinks in half millimeters. He lives”—she taps her head—“on a different cosmic timescale.” One of the challenges in animating anything by hand is how to keep the rate of motion consistent for objects moving at different speeds. Depicting one person running is easy, but when you have two people, and one of them is slightly faster than the other, making their movements line up from frame to frame requires all sorts of tricky calculations. But Tania has seen him, on The Overcoat, do this by pure instinct. He simply knows how much to move each figure, and he can improvise individual running styles for them, too. She shakes her head. “We ask him, why, why not take help? Why do you always make it so hard on yourself? But the only things Yuri Borisovich is afraid of are the things that might really help him.”
The trouble with Russia, he thinks, is that it’s so hard to trust anything. Many things seem real but aren’t; other things, like art, seem made-up but are in fact the only sources of truth. This morning, for instance. This morning is perfect. The white clouds over the city are staggering, enormous. Someone will say that if you stand in the middle of Red Square and face St. Basil’s, the candy-bright cathedral will look, under the citadel of cloud, about three inches high. Well: beautiful. But Putin’s head is always poking in. Every year, for the city’s massive May Day parades, the government wants blue skies. So every April, Russian planes seed the clouds to disperse them. And that, people say, is the real reason the air over the city grows so dramatic in late spring, because when the clouds come back, they are changed. He, Norstein, autographs picture books; Putin can’t rest until he has signed his name on the sky.
He keeps photos of Putin on the corkboard over his worktable: the all-powerful autocrat, caught making ridiculous faces. Scrunching his head down into his neck while counting money. Jutting out his neck, a blond turtle, to straighten his tie.
Once, on the side of a building near his studio, he found some old graffiti reading, “A dick up the nose of the state.” He took a picture of it, which he likes to show to his guests. “Oh, how I wished I had written that!” he says. “Straight up their noses! I might not have written it, but I’ll tell you what I did do: I marched up and down the sidewalk shouting it for days!”
* * *
Here they come: the revolutionaries. Marching down the street. A band of cartoon silhouettes, red, flat, wearing workers’ caps, with jagged bayonets affixed to the ends of their rifles. Their momentum pulls the angular city behind them into a blur. Capitalists—fat, black-jacketed squiggles with fat round squiggles for faces—wobble out from the buildings, shaking fat fists and bellowing: “Go back, stop this at once!” The workers keep coming. The music is by Shostakovich, and when the cymbals crash, the silhouettes flash. The workers come faster. Running now, rifles akimbo, limbs flying: a red chaos, a sea monster seething with spines. The capitalists gape and totter backward into their towers.
He is making his first film as a director. Finally, after so many years. He is twenty-six now, in 1967, and he feels that he has waited a long time. He and Francheska have moved into their own apartment, his first home away from the kommunalka, where he had lived with his mother since his father died. The film is an eight-minute short about the October Revolution. He is co-directing it with another animator, Arkady Tyurin. He and Tyurin share an enthusiasm for the avant-garde political art of the early Soviet era, the period of Tatlin and Malevich, and they have decided to bring the uprising to life by bringing revolutionary paintings and posters from the era of the uprising to life. This is, of course, a way to talk about politics that is also a way to talk about art, and about the relation of animation to art. He has learned a great deal in the years he has spent working on other people’s films. He is eager to think about what he has learned, and about how the lessons might tie together to make a career.
One thing he has learned: He likes working with cutouts. The trick, in producing animated films, is how to make the labor manageable. The most straightforward way to make a picture move is to draw it over and over, changing it slightly where movement occurs: Think of the flip-book doodles you might make on the corner of a notebook. But this becomes prohibitively labor-intensive once you start to imagine scenes with many static elements—walls, windows, trees, background imagery—because each of these elements would have to be redrawn, in exactly the same way, every time a character turned her head or took a step. Traditional cel animation gets around this difficulty by placing moving elements on transparent sheets of celluloid, which are then overlaid on one background image. You make several drawings of the dragon flying, then photograph each of them, in turn, atop a single drawing of the castle. Run the photographs at high speeds, and you see the dragon soaring over the battlements.
In cutout animation, the principle is similar, but instead of redrawing the dragon to make it fly, you make a dragon cutout, a jointed drawing with articulating parts, and physica
lly move its wings. This is intended as a way of saving time, but he feels it as an artistic possibility. Cutout characters have a consistent physical identity, unlike characters in cel animation. But unlike in puppet animation, where the puppets are three-dimensional objects inhabiting the same physical universe as people, cutout characters can be integrated into their backgrounds in the same ways drawings can, with the same tricks of depth and perspective. Cutout animators interact with their characters as puppeteers do, but it is as if they were puppeteers inside the worlds created by their drawings.
The film takes its name from a poem by Mayakovsky: “25th—the First Day.” He and Tyurin incorporate works by Chagall, by Mayakovsky himself, by the revolutionary era’s great artists, then throw them together in hurtling juxtapositions; the pace and the use of double-exposed images recall Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, the groundbreaking work of Soviet silent cinema. But when they come to the end, a problem is waiting for them. They want to use a painting by the artist Pavel Filonov, whose aesthetic system, Universal Flowering, combined aspects of cubism and futurism. They find Filonov exhilarating, but his work has been in disgrace with the authorities since the late 1920s. They are told to change their script. Lectures in dismal offices: some suggestions, comrades, for your ending. Ugly ashtrays, buzzing lights. The people need a film about Lenin. The people have no need for this frippery about art.
They try to concoct a plan that will please the bureaucrats while keeping the film true to their conception. But they are young and inexperienced, and they have no leverage with the studio. They are forced to insert a scene, made by splicing together photographs and old film footage, that shows Lenin giving a speech to a celebrating crowd. It looks and sounds like a newsreel, and it has nothing to do with the study of revolutionary art and its relationship to animation that they have tried to make. He feels ashamed—and his bosses hate the film anyway. He is rewarded for his contribution to the smooth functioning of the propaganda state by being trucked off to produce a fire-safety video for children.
Well, comrade, what did you expect? You have a role to play in society. You make light entertainments for the masses. Isn’t it a little late to pose as an aggrieved artist?
He thinks: To do what you see in your mind, you will have to learn to manipulate the system.
He thinks: I don’t care what happens to me, I will never compromise again.
* * *
If civilization is fallen, if the imagination of the artist offers our only model of a better world, then not to compromise is the artist’s first duty; a vision adulterated by outside influence is a vision infected by the malady it means to cure. But what if the refusal to compromise results in a masterpiece that cannot be finished? What if the prerequisite for producing great art makes a great artwork impossible to produce?
He begins The Overcoat at the start of the 1980s: a good time for him, a moment when his career feels like a fight he has won. Tale of Tales, his luminous, nonlinear film about art and memory, has been rapturously received at international film festivals; the authorities have allowed the film to travel, though not him with it. He has been in and out, mostly out, of the state’s good graces, but he has on his side a group of fellow animators and artistic administrators that his friend, the writer Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, calls a “mafia of decent people.” They know how to maneuver against the censors. When Tale of Tales was under review, the authorities assumed that it must be subversive, since they had no idea what it was about. But his friends anticipated this, and arranged for his past work to win an important state prize just before the new film went before the functionaries. That way, the censors could not ban Tale of Tales without attacking the judgment of the powerful prize committee; they fumed, but they let the film pass.
He has learned how to obfuscate, how to plot, how to disguise his intentions. He has learned to speak a language in which “yes” means “maybe” and “perhaps” means “never.” He writes film treatments that bear no resemblance to the movies he wants to make, then, when the budget is approved, throws out the treatments. And when the bosses complain about unannounced changes, about budget overruns, about blown deadlines: But of course we can talk about it, comrade, nothing could be simpler. Perhaps we should assemble a committee? Delay till you can get them on your side. Delay till your film exists and can persuade them. Delay till they have a choice between releasing your film and releasing nothing; let them think about how, if they choose nothing, they will explain themselves.
The story “The Overcoat,” Gogol’s story, is dear to him. Akaky Akakievich is a lowly clerk in St. Petersburg. This is mid-nineteenth century, the Russia of the czars. St. Petersburg is the imperial capital. The functions of government are divided among a large class of civil servants, each ranked according to a rigid hierarchy, from the meanest scribe to the most exalted minister. One’s place in the hierarchy determines one’s whole life. So here, already, he feels, is the Russian national disease, the flaw that has unspooled from serfdom on, the flaw communism was supposed to (but did not) correct: the obliteration of common human feeling by a morbid obsession with rank.
Akaky Akakievich’s rank is lowly. At fifty—pale, stooped, balding—he spends his life hunched over an inkwell, copying official papers. He has no friends, and his imaginative life is wholly confined to his work: Sometimes he brings pages home to copy in the evenings, just for his own satisfaction. But early one winter, when the snow is swirling and the cold is nipping at the heels of the clerks on Nevsky Prospekt, he realizes that his old overcoat is too thin and frayed to last another season. He will have to replace it. An overcoat is a huge expense. He saves for months. He finds himself, quite uncharacteristically, fantasizing about his new garment: how warm it will be, how rich, how splendid.
At last the day comes when the tailor delivers the coat. Carefully, Akaky slips it on: It’s perfect. His small swelling of pride actually dizzies him. Everything seems different now that he has the coat! His colleagues, who normally tease him, invite him to a party. But on the way home, passing through a dark square, he is stopped by robbers. The robbers steal his new coat. In shock, he goes to see a high-ranking official who, he is told, will be able to find his coat for him. But the official only yells at him. It is freezing in St. Petersburg, and Akaky Akakievich, lacking a coat, catches a fever. He dies. After his death, a ghost appears in the city, a ghost that rips the coats off people’s shoulders as if it is searching for its own.
He is drawn to “The Overcoat” partly because Gogol’s imagination is ideally suited to an animated film. The details are so eccentric and so vivid. There is the tailor, Petrovich, with his deformed big toenail, “thick and hard as a tortoiseshell,” who curses at his thread when it won’t go through the needle: “You’ll be the death of me, you devil!” There is the “rather weakly built” policeman who, Gogol tells us, was once knocked off his feet by a “quite normal-sized, fully mature piglet which came tearing out of a private house.”
But he also loves “The Overcoat” for the same reason the story has resonated in Russian culture. Its moral theme, the perversion of empathy by power, is a cry right from the heart of everyday Russian tragedy. He feels this with a passion he is barely able to contain. This is what art is for, this is what it can do: It can show people that fellow feeling runs deeper than the arbitrary distinctions that raise one person over another. Gogol’s story includes a moving scene. A clerk is taunting Akaky Akakievich, who responds, as he always does, by muttering, “Leave me alone, why do you have to torment me?” The clerk, who has been laughing, suddenly falls silent. And for a long time, Gogol says, those words will haunt the clerk, even in his happiest moments, because he hears the sound of others underneath them: “I am your brother.”
He thinks his adaptation will be twenty minutes long and take at most a few years to complete. But the film grows in the making. A scene that is meant to last one and a half minutes comes in at more than sixteen. Deadlines fly by. Perhaps it will run for sixty minutes i
nstead of twenty. Perhaps a little more. The production runs into problems almost immediately, and the problems compound. He and Francheska have furious arguments—they always fight when they’re working, always have fought when she’s designed one of his films, but this time the stakes seem higher because Gogol’s story is so important. The characters and the setting must look exactly right. They spend months searching for the precise downcast angle of the eyes, the precise worried furrow of the brow, to represent Akaky Akakievich. Production stops for months at a time while he maneuvers behind the scenes to get a promotion for his longtime cameraman, Alexander Zhukovsky, but the elitist buffoons who control the Soviet art system reserve advancement for university graduates. Norstein isn’t one, and neither is his friend. The attempt fails, after consuming huge chunks of the calendar. By 1986, he is years behind schedule, and the studio has promised his space to another director. He is evicted. Soon he loses his job altogether. He has no choice but to abandon The Overcoat or find a way to make it on his own.
While the structure of his creative life is collapsing, the whole world seems to follow suit. The Berlin Wall comes down. The Eastern bloc disintegrates. Along with the rest of humanity, he watches Yeltsin standing on a tank—Boris Nikolayevich, with his face like beaten dough—and witnesses the end of the economic and cultural regime under which he has labored for his entire adult life.
The problem now is one of how to live. How can he get by, with a stalled film and a back catalog from which he has no clear hope of profit? He can teach classes, for one. He can give lectures. He finds that he is admired enough abroad, in Europe and Japan, for opportunities to present themselves, and now he is free to travel, so: Paris, Tokyo, art schools, film schools, museums. He plows his fees back into The Overcoat or toward keeping his small team of artists together. He works on his film when he can. When he takes on foreign investment, the deals go badly, because the investors want a say in what his picture will be like, and he refuses to listen to them. The investors want him to work abroad, where they can watch how their money is being spent, and he does not want to move away from Moscow. It turns out that the tactics he has learned for operating under communism, the oblique stubbornness and concealed perseverance, do not work in the same way under capitalism, where stricter accounts are kept; and he feels frequently unmoored, unsure of the ground under his feet.
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