the humanistic spirit and poetic aesthetics of Russian animated films (on the example of the work of Yuri Norstein)

Van Cuiping PhD in Technical Science Senior Lecturer, Department of the Russian Language of the Department of International Cooperation, Shandong Professional College of Water Management 276826, China, Rizhao city, Xueyuanlu Str., 677 785886384@qq.com Other publications by this author

Vo E Senior Lecturer, Animation Department, Art Institute of Qufu Pedagogical University 276826, Kitai, g. Zhichzhao, ul. Yan'taibeilu, 80 107190909@qq.com

Russia is one of the greatest countries in the world, whose achievements in the field of literature, architecture, painting, music, theater and other types of art make up the treasury of world culture. Russia is also among the world leaders in the field of animated films, deservedly occupying a prominent place among the countries that create animated films. Geographically extending over a large area of Europe and Asia, the Russian state has absorbed the cultural genes inherent in both the European educational tradition and the Eastern one. The mixing and collision of two cultural and aesthetic codes naturally reflected the appearance of a wide variety of styles in Russian animation. These works are characterized by bright colors that are characteristic of pictorial art and are so popular with the Russian audience, these films absorb and integrate the charm of European classic fairy tales, subtly borrow Hollywood animation elements of character modeling ^[1], rationally use a unique oriental narrative, presenting a complex real, but at the same time lyrical work.

The 30-90s of the twentieth century were the time of the rise and heyday of world animation. Great achievements in the development of the animation industry have occurred, in particular, in the countries of Eastern Europe, including in the Soviet animated cinema. The fame of Russian animation of this period is associated with the name of the director, animator, world-class animation master — Yuri Norstein. He has been awarded numerous awards for his work, including at the most prestigious international animation film festivals in Ottawa, Zagreb, Annecy, Sydney, Chicago and many others. His work "The Tale of Fairy Tales" (1979) was recognized as "the best animated film of all time" by the results of an international survey conducted by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts in Los Angeles in 1984. The famous Japanese animator, winner of two Academy Awards, Hayao Miyazaki praised the work of his Russian colleague: "Yuri Norstein is the greatest artist, master of animation, who had the deepest influence on me, his "Hedgehog in the Fog" is my favorite cartoon" ^{[2, p. 35]}.

The symbolism of Yuri Norstein 's movie images

An important stage in the development of world animation was the creation of the Disney Studio of animated films, which conquered the public at the beginning of the last century with the uncomplicated style of its products designed for the mass consumer. These animated works focused on the development and breakthrough of the main character of the film. The plots of the cartoons were based on the confrontation of good and evil. They told about how the main character, having experienced the ups and downs, having gained extraordinary opportunities, overcoming all obstacles, eventually achieves the desired goal and becomes a hero in the eyes of others. The means of solving problems in such films are often miracles and magic. The narrative structure of such animations, reflecting the heroic path, is able to create an appropriate emotional atmosphere in a short time and satisfy the psychological needs of the public, thereby winning the audience's sympathy. However, since such stories are too disconnected from reality and cannot be compared with real life, it is natural that they are unable to cause viewers to have a deep introspection, reflection, reflections on their real life.

The symbolic imagery inherent in Yuri Norstein's films strongly distinguishes them from Disney animation. In the work of the Russian director, it is not difficult to feel the unique sentimentalism of Russian traditional culture and even more feel its humanistic appeal. In Norstein's cartoons there are practically no heroic images in their traditional sense, most of his main characters come from the ordinary world and return to the ordinary world. They are shown by the director in the usual conditions of their existence, but through the prism of the author's thoughts, memories, impressions, and therefore are in a unique process of interpreting the entire film.

In most of Yuri Norstein's films, the surrounding world is viewed through the eyes of animals; animals as characters are used by the author to metaphorically denote the living conditions of different social groups. The main character of Norstein's brilliant work "The Tale of Fairy Tales", a gray top, watches the world with sad understanding. The cartoon is an alternation of pictures-memories, and a small gray top shows the audience this wonderful world, moving them to different eras. The "Fairy Tale of Fairy Tales" tape is built as a labyrinth of memory, the past and the future, fiction and reality are intertwined in it — real life is closely adjacent to the world of miracles. In its poetics, the film is close to the paintings of Andrei Tarkovsky. Here is a mother bending over her baby and singing lullabies to him; and here is a wooden building with a small courtyard that has preserved all the signs of post-war life: here we see a poet looking for inspiration; a fisherman with a catch who is in a hurry to his family; a woman washing clothes in a trough; a little boy who shares with crows with apples picked up in the snow, and also his alcoholic father... One of the end—to-end themes of the film is young couples dancing on the playground to the sounds of the pre-war tango; men in overcoats going to the front, women left alone ...^[3] At the end of the tape, a spinning top steals a manuscript from the poet, which suddenly turns into a crying baby. To calm the child, the spinning top sings to him the eternal "bye-bye-bye" and at the same time opens the door to childhood, that amazing fairy-tale world where summer dazzles with its radiance, where fish swim across the sky, and ripe apples fall from trees in winter... But one memory remains of all this.

Yuri Norstein pushed the characteristics of animation to the limit: he abandoned the linear structure of the narrative, using the interweaving of audiovisual images and witty relationships between symbolic visual elements in order to convey to the audience a clearer, intuitive and strong spiritual experience. This method of poetic narration, addressed to the viewer's personal emotional and intellectual experience, allows him to consciously take the point of view of the creator, become a kind of accomplice and, thus, penetrate into the hidden meaning of the film, accept its aesthetics, its ideas that cause deep reflection ^[4].

In an interview , Yuri Norstein said: "I don't consider myself an avant-garde artist, I prefer to consider myself a magician."^[5] Against the background of all modern animation, where the commercial component is very strong, the animated works of Yuri Norstein and a number of other famous Russian animation directors stand out for their special purity, honesty, humanism, and love for the world around them. These animated works are as beautiful as poetry, as the world transformed by the magician Yuri Norstein.

Another outstanding work of the director should be noted — "Hedgehog in the Fog" (1975). The main character of the cartoon is a little hedgehog who went to visit his friend bear and got lost in the forest in the afternoon fog. As a result, the familiar and understandable world around him acquires the features of mystery, becomes outlandish, changes the usual shapes and sizes. It's as if reality and a dream overlap each other, and it's impossible to say whether it's a reality or a vision. Such unexpected metamorphoses frighten the hedgehog, lead to confusion. Experiencing fear, helplessness and sometimes despair along the way, he eventually gets to the house of the bear cub, who is waiting for a friend to drink tea with raspberry jam and count the stars. Among the technical means implemented in the film is the use of tiered decorations, thanks to which the "fog effect" is used. Fog helps the director in creating fantastic scenes, in displaying the uncertainty of the world, in giving all the characters encountered on the hedgehog's way strangeness and mystery.

In fact, the story told by Yuri Norstein is a narrative about the fears and fantasies of a dreamy child. The vast world, thickening around him in the twilight like a white fog, swallowed up everything that was familiar. And in the final scene of the film, having reached his friend, the bear cub, the baby sits quiet and silent, shocked by his magical experiences. Looking into the lens of Yuri Norstein, we feel his warmth and love for this defenseless touching child who lives inside each of us.

    The poetic as a form of reflection of the real.

The 1930s in the field of Soviet cinema were marked by the creation of a special cinematic language that combined realistic traditions with the latest techniques. During these years there was a wide discussion between supporters of "prosaic" and "poetic" cinema. The prosaic was defined as alien to screen art. Narrative and realistic films were considered as a genre, but not a genuine movie designed to evoke emotions. Adherents of poetry in cinema identified it with a qualitative change in physical reality when transferred to film. Gradually, the categorical distinction of cinema into poetic and prosaic was overcome. In prose cinema, the plot is based on a plot, an event series, a story of a specific story. Such a movie tends to the truthfulness of the presentation of real events, reliable reconstruction of space, to the psychologism of images. At the same time, poetic cinema is characterized by a weakening of the plot frame, it is the form, not the meaning, that determines the composition of the work. Poetic cinema is based on a certain pictorial language and a stylistic device that acquires independent significance, symbolic imagery is enhanced, in addition, the "hero" of the work becomes the cinorech itself.

Poetic cinema is actually the legacy and development of the French avant—garde, which considered cinema the most powerful poetic medium. The French avant-gardists were supporters of "pure cinema", they absolutized the category of poetic and on this basis divided cinema art into authentic and traditional (which they did not consider art). The avant-garde tried to break away from the traditional literary and dramatic form of cinema, striving for a visible change in form and rhythm. The "poetic factor" in the work was considered as an internal association of the creator, so the purpose of the film was not just a reflection of objective events of real life, but such an image processing with which the creator expressed his thoughts, concepts, feelings.

Andrey Tarkovsky, reflecting on this topic, believed that the director as an artist "begins when his idea or already in his tape has its own special imaginative system, its own system of thoughts about the real world, and the director... he shares it with the viewer as his most cherished dreams. Only when he has his own view of things, becoming a kind of philosopher, he acts as an artist ..." ^{[3, p. 52]}. As an example, Tarkovsky, in particular, considered Eisenstein's film Ivan the Terrible, noting at the same time that the film "consists entirely of hieroglyphs, large, small and minute, there is not a single detail in it that would not be permeated by the author's intention or intent."

Cultures of different countries and peoples at different stages of their development, overcoming space and time, are able to resonate at the level of ideas and concepts. It can be said that the basic concept of a poetic film is very close to the concept of an artistic idea realized in the traditional Chinese aesthetic system. Any work begins with an idea that arose from the author. This idea can take the form of both a sudden insight and a complex conclusion, which is exactly what is called an artistic idea. Artistic design, like poetic cinema aesthetics, focuses on the expression of author's feelings through the interpretation of artistic images, and both are based on individual experience and understanding of people.

The poetic film explores the inner world of people, the lyrical and philosophical nature of man as the main object. He abandons the tradition that pays attention mainly to the integrity, imagery and typicality of the plot, conveying the appropriate mood and atmosphere, and turns to the image of reality through inner perception, experiences, rethinking ^[4]. The classic film production "The Tale of Fairy Tales" by Yuri Norstein is just like that. Thanks to the artistic reinterpretation by the creator of various images, a tense field is created in the emotional memory of the viewer, forcing him to think, feel and see clearly. The poetic world of cinema, created in this way and representing the unity of poetry, art and philosophy, is also characteristic of Chinese artistic aesthetics.

The concept and method of processing visual images in animated films by Yuri Norstein are based on the principles of avant-garde and poetic cinema. The traditions of poetic cinema, inherited and developed in the works of the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, thanks to the genius of Yuri Norstein, have found creative embodiment in another kind of cinematography — animation. Both directors work with the subconscious of the viewer, they introduce elements of the natural element into their films, holding their attention to them: it can be the rustle of a dry leaf, and a breath of wind, and the flickering of fire, and the sound of an apple falling from a tree — all that can cause associations and a sense of the eternal movement of life. Animated films, unlike feature films, are easier to meet the requirements for creating a poetic film. Animation masters can freely operate with various techniques of image, color creation, motion transmission, compositional and temporal construction. Compared to art cinema, animation is a kind of art of pure expression, and the authors of poetic films have the opportunity to design their own visual world.

In the "Tale of Fairy Tales" Yuri Norstein uses a variety of techniques for creating images. For example, the technique of rearranging paper puppets allows you to reproduce more complex variants of movement and thus saturate each frame of the film with details ^[6]. The use of chiaroscuro enhances the overall poetic atmosphere of the narrative. The lack of precise contours of objects, some visual blurring of the image help to create a sense of its unity, inseparability from the environment. In addition, in this film, the director changes his attitude to such a concept as time in the frame. Norstein, in contrast to the previously accepted settings in animation for the brevity of the presentation of the picture, uses a long frame to solve his artistic tasks. All these and many other techniques allow you to achieve depth, texture and poetry of the image.

When the artistic and poetic images of the film "The Tale of Fairy Tales" are embodied, the influence of painting is guessed to one degree or another. Among the artists whose aesthetics turned out to be close to Norstein, one should name Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Picasso. Yuri Vasnetsov's children's illustrations had a great influence on the director's special perception of the surrounding world. Norstein himself noted the presence in his film of Japanese aesthetics associated with poetry, painting, and the attitude of the inhabitants of this island country. When depicting people, the director, breaking the cartoon tradition, takes as a basis the style of the sketch, reminiscent of Picasso's graphics and drawings on Pushkin's margins.

"The Tale of Fairy Tales" is one of the most complex in symbolic and poetic terms of Norstein's tapes, here there is an interweaving of the past and the present, reality and visions, real and fantastic. The film juxtaposes visual real and symbolic images: a gray spinning top, an old Moscow courtyard, dim street lights, young couples dancing on the playground at night, soldiers going to the front, the sounds of rushing echelons, fluttering in the wind and falling leaves, ripe apples in the snow and a little boy who feeds them to a crow — a combination of all these the images make up the expressive lyrical and poetic system of the film. Moreover, many visual elements that seem to have no internal connection are actually carefully arranged by the author in such a way that they form a poetic rhythm and narrative. The general metaphoricity of the picture, based on personal memories and impressions of its creator, excites people, viewers naturally have nostalgia for their past, their childhood, everything connected with it.

An important element in creating the atmosphere of "Fairy Tales of Fairy tales" is music. The intonation of the film was influenced by fragments from the works of Bach and Mozart. The sounds of the pre-war tango "Tired Sun", which sounded from almost every dance floor in those years, make a painfully recognizable, nostalgic note. However, the leitmotif of the whole film is a Russian lullaby, which plays almost a central role, it sounds unobtrusively in our ears many times: "I'm going, I'm going, don't lie down on the edge: a gray top will come, grab you by the side and drag you into a dark forest...". Later in one of his interviews, Norstein he will say that the main character of the work is a gray top and, in his opinion, also a lullaby. With this song, lulling the child, the film begins and ends. The final scene of the work, in which a gray wolf sings a lullaby to calm a crying baby, gives birth to indistinct memories in the viewer, touching the most secret corners of his soul.

Norstein considered The Tale of Fairy Tales to be an autobiographical film and repeatedly emphasized that it reflected his life experience and personal impressions ^[5]. Since the whole film is filled with symbols and metaphors, the audience has a lot of guesses and interpretations concerning its content and meaning, but no speculation can hide the rich connotation of this work.

As an outstanding director in the field of animation, Yuri Norstein occupies a special place in this art form, making a huge contribution to its progressive movement. Animated works of the artist, imbued with poetic aesthetics and humanistic spirit, serve as a certain guideline in the development of the world animation industry.