Impossible Owls

by Brian Phillips

  In any case, the troubled status of his film limits interest from investors. The endless production of The Overcoat costs him his chance at Miyazaki-like international fame, but then, what good would international fame be if it meant rushing or skimping on The Overcoat? The story is more urgent than ever; it is only the work that is slow.

  And so, slowly, his status in the culture of the new Russia drifts into something curious; he is half laughed at, half revered. Once a decade or so, he releases a few minutes of new work: a series of commercials for a sugar company in 1994, a set of opening titles for a long-running children’s show in 2000. In 2003, his tiny, two-minute sequence about the poet Basho appears in a Japanese omnibus film called Winter Days, featuring the work of thirty-five directors. Each of his new pieces is, in its own way, marvelous, but they are all either work for hire, like the sugar commercials, or very brief, like the fragment about Basho.

  He thinks that time is strange. He has never quite understood the way other people seem to perceive it. To imagine life as something so finite, so headlong! Art takes what it takes, and memory has a way of looping back on itself; things that are forgotten are gathered up again and remembered, things that have gone slowly suddenly go very fast. Sometimes an unfinished work—there are portraits by Rembrandt like this—seems old when it is new and then, when it is old, seems so modern it can steal away your breath. Sometimes, at his talks, he shows the crowd a clip from the scene in which Akaky Akakievich holds his old coat up to the light, to see whether the fabric can be mended. The footage is in black and white. Akaky’s big, fretful head turns in the wavering candlelight. He wipes his nose. He has been out in the storm. Shining droplets roll off the brim of his hat. He raises the coat and bunches the fabric in his fingers. He puts it over his head like a tent. His fingers slide out through small holes. It is as simple as that. He is quiet, careful, and serious. The scene is so mesmerizing, and so unlike anything the audience has seen before, that unless the crowd is full of animators, no one thinks to ask how a two-dimensional cutout could create realistic bulges and wrinkles in cloth.

  * * *

  How can a two-dimensional cutout inhabit a three-dimensional world? Animation is traditionally filmed by a camera that points downward, into parallel sheets of glass: This is the system that Disney, for instance, used for more than fifty years, from the 1930s all the way through The Little Mermaid, in the late 1980s. The lowest sheet holds the static background painting; the top sheet holds foreground elements, typically characters, either cutouts or drawings on celluloid. A minimal setup might have only two or three panes, but in a more complicated one, layers of glass between top and bottom might be used for objects in the middle distance, or to create an illusion of depth. The camera is suspended above the stack of panes, so that when it takes a photograph, it resolves the separate layers into a single image, just as your eye might if you looked through a series of windows, each with part of a picture painted on it.

  A complex multi-plane system, such as the one Disney developed, offered early animators a solution to one of the new medium’s trickiest problems: how to simulate advanced camera movement. Animators wanted their work to incorporate the visual grammar of live-action films, but a two-dimensional image under a camera does not behave like three-dimensional space. Tracking shots, for instance, were almost impossible to achieve in early hand-drawn animation, because zooming the camera in on a flat background drawing would make distant elements grow larger at the same rate as closer ones, which is not how we perceive forward motion in the real world: When we drive down the highway, the far-off mountain and the road sign do not grow at the same pace. With a multi-plane animation stand, however, animators could simulate tracking shots by raising foreground and middle-ground planes toward the camera while leaving the background plane in place. An animation stand of this sort would typically be operated by several technicians working at once, and would require an enormous number of calculations to make sure that rules of perspective were maintained.

  He is allowed to make his second film as a solo director in 1974, when he is thirty-three. For his text, he takes an old Russian folktale, a skazka. But when he thinks of the look he wants for the movie, he finds that his thoughts keep straying to some ideas he has about Asian painting, ideas that have been with him for a long time. The year his father died, when he was fifteen, he came across a book of Japanese poetry. He was thrilled by its combination of extreme concision and extreme openness, the way it painted tiny, vivid scenes that seemed to contain vast meaning. Now he thinks: Isn’t the haiku a perfect template for an animated scene? It offers one resonant action, one perfected moment: The old frog jumps into the pond. The firefly lights up inside the soldier’s helmet. His love of Japanese poetry has led him, over the years, to Japanese painting, and then to Chinese painting, and he has been thinking about the ways in which these traditions treat perspective and background: not as a mathematical extension of foreground, but as something free-floating, suggestive. Something unfixed. The hint of a mountain in faint brushstrokes, ink flowing behind smoke.

  He thinks that he wants to explore the potential of indefinite background depth in an animated film. He thinks that perhaps the way to turn animation into the kind of art he values is not to make it self-consciously “adult,” not to make it political or place it in explicit dialogue with avant-garde aesthetic movements, but instead to intensify what it traditionally is: uncomplicated, lovely, with access to strong, direct feeling. He imagines a film that is technically marvelous, that is beautiful, but that places the most sophisticated techniques in the service of a haiku-like simplicity. What if it were possible to make films that could be loved by adults and children alike, because they made no distinction between work intended for one and work intended for the other? At their most childlike, they would possess a visionary beauty that linked them to fine art; at their most experimental, they would have the sincerity of lyric and the radiance of childhood memory.

  With Francheska, he has been exploring ways to merge his physical cutouts with their drawn surroundings. They have found that if they make the cutout from celluloid instead of card stock, and leave a margin of transparent cel around the outline of the character, they have more control over how the cutout blends into its environment. They have also decided to forgo static background painting altogether. Instead, they experiment with building each background element from multiple layers of cel, then arranging those layers across different planes on the animation stand to create a sense of texture and physical depth, what he calls “a play of the air.” So everything is a cutout, and everything is a painting: Francheska, it turns out, manages this brilliantly. At the same time, he is working with Zhukovsky to design a new multi-plane animation stand. It is radically, audaciously simple: three panes of glass that can be moved freely, independent of one another, and a few slots for additional panes, which cannot be moved. Unlike the laborious system used by most large studios, including Soyuzmultfilm, their stand can be operated by just two people, an animator and a cameraman. Instead of being optimized for mathematically precise, classical perspective, it is designed to allow the relation between foreground and background to remain unstated, like that of a Chinese ink painting.

  So: In a dark, overgrown garden, full of ruined pillars and fountains, live a heron and a crane. They are lonely, and they would like to live together. But they are also vain. The crane thinks he is the handsomest bird in the garden; you can tell from the smug way he examines the tips of his wing feathers, like a lothario gazing at his fingernails. The heron is a bit of a snob. She walks with her head pointed up in the air, and when she sees the crane, she scans him from head to toe: “Hmph!” He brings her a bouquet of dandelions and asks her to marry him; she blows the dandelion fuzz in his face and says no. But then she thinks: Why did I reject him? I don’t want to live alone, so she runs after him and says that she will marry him after all. But now the crane is wounded and angry, so he rejects her. As soon as he does, he thinks: But why
did I say that? I do want to marry her; I should go after her and tell her. And this continues, with each bird alternately acting as the pursuer and the pursued, through many transformations.

  The story is a gentle satire of human pride, simple enough for a child to find it funny; the narration, by the acclaimed actor Innokenty Smoktunovsky, is a small masterpiece of baritone suavity. But the film becomes darker as it goes. The heron and the crane begin to seem trapped in a ritual they are powerless to escape, and at the same time their suffering begins to seem more real and less cartoonish. Some of this has to do with the way the setting behaves. The garden is a place of strange yellow mists hanging over faraway fields. The black tree line floats over the horizon. Time seems suspended because space does. The sudden rains that blow through when the birds have an argument feel like iterations of the same recurring storm. In the last scene, the heron walks angrily through one such storm while the crane follows her, trying to shield her with an umbrella. We see them from the side, in profile, and from some distance away, behind long slashes of rain, so that they are only silhouettes. We can’t hear the dialogue, but the heron seems to snap at the crane to leave her alone. He falls back. Then he scampers forward, gives the heron his umbrella, and runs off into the storm. The heron, chastened by this gesture of kindness, takes a few tentative steps after him. Mist from the rain covers her up, and though the narrator tells us that the story keeps going, the movie ends.

  * * *

  Moscow keeps going. Moscow ends. It is 1976 and he is back in Maryina Roshcha, his childhood neighborhood, to see it before it disappears. The state is sending bulldozers to knock down old houses from before the revolution. The people who live here are being moved somewhere else; soon, when the new apartment towers are finished, people from somewhere else will be moved here. Brezhnev has ideas about how the populace ought to be housed: out with wooden matchboxes, in with concrete piles.

  The autumn day is warm. He walks, with Zhukovsky, among the old, sunken houses, in their thickets of dark trees. Zhukovsky takes pictures. Already the place looks half-abandoned. In the yards are piles of broken furniture, plaster statues missing arms and heads, car parts, scattered firewood. He sees a beautiful bentwood chair under a poplar tree, propped up on an old nail crate. A cat slinks by. Zhukovsky speaks to it.

  Later, when he sees the photographs, he will think: What a fine silver sheen we give to the departing world.

  He is working on a new film. He has commissioned his friend Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, the well-known novelist and playwright, to write the treatment. Petrushevskaya’s bleak, intelligent literary work has been banned by the government, but animation isn’t literature; why should anyone care if a writer wants to waste time on something as safe as a children’s movie? Petrushevskaya has a new baby, and for weeks the writer and the animator have been walking in the park together, pushing the stroller and arguing about ideas.

  His last film, Hedgehog in the Fog, was a triumph, a picture-book story that left children breathless and animators baffled: How did he make this? The hedgehog sets out on his journey with a tiny bottle of jam wrapped in a spotted kerchief, only to find himself lost in a fog that acts as if it is alive. He is followed by a funny, scary owl who lurks behind him and watches him and mimics his movements. The owl has eyes like round moons and a curved yellow beak, and he looms over the hedgehog with wings spread, as though he plans to have him for dinner. But the owl is also intrigued by the hedgehog; when the little yozhik looks down a well shaft and calls out to hear his voice echo, the owl pauses his pursuit to do the same. The fog swirls around them. The owl vanishes, but then reappears right next to the hedgehog. It calls out; then the fog swallows it up again.

  It is the fog that astounds other animators. It’s too dense and deep to be a drawing, but it cannot be a cutout, and if it is a trick of light and filters, how is it controlled? It opens onto incredible visions, which the little yozhik watches with wonder-struck eyes. It parts to reveal a huge white horse, an enormous fish, a bounding dog. It explodes in a glitter of butterflies.

  Hedgehog is immediately loved by almost everyone who sees it. But now, in the park, Petrushevskaya tells him that he has come to a dead end. He cannot possibly make a film more beautiful than this one. He needs to look in a new direction, she argues, toward the mundane, away from the magical. He needs to look toward the stuff of everyday life.

  He thinks that he would like to make a film about a poet who is misunderstood. But he is also thinking about memory, about the way lives are built up from fragments gathered and mixed together. When you look back on your own life, you never see it as a straight line; it comes to you in a series of moments, loops that play out of order and blur together at the edges. He thinks: Perhaps I could capture the way that feels, that mingling. Perhaps the way to make animation into art is to animate the experience of time.

  Petrushevskaya writes a proposal that is deliberately vague. The idea they are working on is not ready for the censors, and in any case he is not yet sure what sort of film he wants to make. So she concentrates on finding the right tone. “This is to be a film about memory,” her draft begins. “Do you remember how long the days were when you were a child?”

  They write draft after draft of a treatment about a poet. But when he begins to write the shooting script, he is drawn back to his visit to Maryina Roshcha. He goes to see it again, only to find that the bulldozers have been in before him and left it in ruins.

  He had thought of calling his film Tale of Tales, after a poem by the Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet. Now he thinks of a new title, one that looks back to his childhood: The Little Gray Wolf Will Come.

  He and Francheska begin working on designs. They have terrible arguments. He gives her sketches to work from, and he wants her to work quickly, so that her drawings have a spontaneous energy; she prefers to linger over each image until it is perfect. He stomps and thunders. She goes on strike. One night he dreams that he is flying over the earth with lightning bolts shooting out of his chest, killing people on the ground. Francheska tells him that this is all the nastiness coming out of him. But slowly, over months, the look of the film emerges, and a loose structure takes shape.

  What he comes up with is a work longer than his other movies—twenty-nine minutes—and far more ambitious. It will have no single plot, but will be made up of parallel stories, or fragments of stories, that emerge and subside and come back again. A girl jumps rope with the help of her friend, an enormous bull who stands on two legs. A fisherman rows out to sea. In the time of the war, a ghostly procession of soldiers drifts through the air. A mother nurses her infant, humming a lullaby. A poet works on a manuscript. The little gray wolf moves from story to story, watching with big, frightened eyes.

  The stories look so different from one another that they might take place in different worlds. The jump-roping girl and the poet live in a warm, bright seaside idyll with almost no color in it: They look like ink sketches flickering on parchment. Another story, set in a snowy winter garden, is vividly saturated with color: There is a little boy eating a green apple, and his coat is sapphire blue.

  The atmosphere is melancholic. In the time of the war, young women and young men are dancing under a streetlamp to the tango “Weary Sun.” One by one, blip blip blip, the young men disappear. Loose papers, blown in by the wind, circle in the air. The women grasp for them, to read the names of the dead.

  The little gray wolf makes a campfire near a tumbledown kommunalka: his, Norstein’s, own childhood home. The doorway to the house glows with what looks like magical light. The little wolf walks timidly inside, and finds himself, unseen, in a room where the poet is writing. The poet’s cat is sleeping on the table. The magical light seems to emanate from the poet’s pages, lying on the edge of the table. The little wolf’s curiosity gets the better of him: He takes the manuscript and runs into the trees. Now he finds that instead of a manuscript, he is holding a crying baby. In a panic, he rocks the baby and sings a lullaby, the one every Rus
sian child has heard before falling asleep:

  Baby, baby, hush-a-bye,

  On the edge you mustn’t lie,

  Or the little gray wolf will come,

  And will nip you on the tum,

  Take you off into the wood

  Underneath the willow root.

  When the authorities review the film, they say: A suggestion, comrade, about your title. They think he should call it Memories of My Childhood. He sits in the office of the head script editor, and while the embarrassed representative of the state examines a crumb on the table, they agree that he will instead use the film’s original title, Skazka skazok: Tale of Tales. It isn’t a bad name, he thinks, only slightly jarring. Skazka is also the name for a fairy tale. A communist bureaucrat’s office seems like a strange place to settle on “once upon a time.”

  * * *

  Once upon a time there was a writer whose fear of God was so great that he died of it. Nikolai Gogol was an odd, thin, furtive, nervous man—tall, hawk-nosed, slightly stooped; you picture the cloak forever swirling behind him—with a biting sense of humor. In 1828 he came to the capital, St. Petersburg, from a farm in Ukraine and once there proceeded to write a series of brilliant, bizarre stories: not only “The Overcoat,” but also the satirical play The Government Inspector, and “The Nose,” a story about a man who wakes up one morning to find that his nose is missing, and, worse, that it is traveling around the city in a hat and cape, impersonating a powerful official. In 1842, he published the first part of his greatest work, the novel Dead Souls. He intended to write two more installments. But Gogol became pious as he aged, and he fell under the influence of a spiritual elder who convinced him that his literary work was a sin. One night in the winter of 1852, he threw the unfinished manuscript of the second part of Dead Souls onto the fire. He took to his bed and died a few days later—of starvation, it is commonly thought, though the official registry lists the cause of his death as “a cold.”