Aliens on a visit: what vector has Suzdalfest outlined for animation
Lonely phantasmagoria with documentary overtones — this is how Russian author's animation can be defined in 2025. At least, this is evidenced by the optics of the large-scale XXX anniversary Suzdalfest competition (March 19-24) of several dozen short and full-length films. Izvestia visited the mainline screening of the freest form of cinema and shares their impressions.
What was shown at the Suzdalfest
What can we say about the contest, which begins with a film about the Holocaust and ends with a story about how a harmless alien was shot down over the USSR? About a contest where there are stories about kidnapping, about a girl who is late for an important ski championship because of a traffic jam, about a grandmother who realized that her elderly husband had turned into a giant turtle, and now she had to accept him as he is? It is quite obvious that animation in Russia has become not a form of escapism, but a reflection on social topics, an attempt to answer complex questions through a non-banal approach, detailed metaphors, and paradoxical moves.
Let's say the movie about the Holocaust mentioned above. What could sound more boring and hackneyed? But 24-year-old Anastasia Lis has found a solution for this topic no less inventive than, say, Michel Hazanavicius in the animated full-meter "The Most Valuable Cargo", which is currently being shown at the Russian box office.
"The Fairy Tale of Iskorka" (first place in the audience vote, second in the rating of festival professionals) is a tiny doll fantasy about what a girl sees in a dream, sleeping in her mother's arms in a freight car. The film lasts only seven minutes, and with each of them we become more and more numb with horror, realizing how such touching, such beautiful dreams of the girl will end.
In the credits, there will only be the hissing of gas on a black background, but the effect is such that it is difficult to hold on any longer. But it is necessary, because in the same block is the sarcastic essay "Socially approved positions of bodies in space" (jury diploma), which ends with Lenin in the Mausoleum, and the macabre black comedy "Tram No. 13" (jury diploma), where a little girl defied Death and saved all her victims, passengers of the vehicle, from the old woman., and the documentary animation "Bench", where an elderly German teacher complains to a student she doesn't know that German is no longer needed anywhere, so the profession is no longer needed.
"The festival exists primarily to see how our industry pulsates, what it breathes," Konstantin Bronzit, a two—time Oscar nominee, told Izvestia. He won the prize for the best feature film "Luntik. Returning home."
The industry breathes in different ways. So, the animated series competition demonstrates a very definite trend. TV channels need a lot of content. We need it to be operational and socially useful, because parents require infotainment for their children. That's why studios try to make it cheap, flashy, and overly clear, but in such a way that every episode of the series necessarily teaches the little viewer something. And after all, there are more than 400 studios in Russia, which means we have to compete for the attention of buyers.
As a result, the series seem loud, monotonous, and head-on, it's not surprising that they quickly begin to cause rejection in children. And the adults, it seems, ran into their own rake: they wanted the guys to learn a lot of important things about the world in a few hours in front of the TV, but children remember sticky tunes, eccentric characters and an acid palette.
Still, the laurels of "Peppa Pig" and "Three Cats" haunt me, because, again, TV channels need content, and there's not much to take it from today. In this sense, Suzdal should help solve this problem by finding those who will make commercial content both attractive and shameless.
— We see that the guys with whom we started and did original projects are gradually coming and becoming significant people in commercial projects, — producer Artem Vasiliev told Izvestia. — Of course, you get to know them here, you see their handwriting, you understand these people when you watch them for several days of the festival.
Who won the festival in Suzdal
One of the most interesting programs of Suzdalfest was the morning screenings of children's amateur works. These are cartoons that were made by children from the age of four to almost adulthood. It is clear that this is mostly a collective effort and that an important role was played by the teacher, who helped the children express their intention. But more importantly, this idea is felt, and it does not repeat at all the animated series on which these children seem to have been raised. Therefore, the professionals in the hall carefully examined these works.
"I tell them honestly that the only difference between us is that I was born earlier and managed to do something for which I was awarded or singled out, but in general we are the same,— animation artist Mikhail Aldashin explained to Izvestia.
In one cartoon, the main characters are two Christmas tree friends in a snowy forest. They witness an alien invasion of Earth, helplessly watching as the aliens burn down cities and ruin crops. And then they try to start a dialogue with the monsters, and it turns out that they just don't know what could be different, and if you explain it to them, then the villains will become beautiful and kind.
In another cartoon, two hooligan rabbits decided to deceive a friend and pumped air into carrots in his garden, so that in the end, the bloated vegetable blew them away like a balloon.
And in the shortest cartoon, a Hedgehog comes out onto the yellow leaves and says, "Hi, I'm a Hedgehog! Autumn has come..." And leaves. Titles. It feels like haiku, where everything is perfect and requires no explanation. Perhaps the author of the film will become the new Norstein. By the way, Yuri Borisovich spent all the days of the festival communicating with the audience, signing autographs, and selling books. But the court with the Central Bank, where he and Francesca Yarbusova are demanding compensation for using the image of a Hedgehog in the fog, refused to comment to Izvestia, explaining that his lawyer did not recommend doing this now.
The tragic page of the jubilee festival was the unexpected death of the poet Vadim Zhuk, who for many years led the opening and closing ceremonies of Suzdalfest and was one of its main mascots. On March 19, he was unable, for health reasons, as the organizers say, to go on stage, and on March 20 he died. That day, he wrote poems that ended with the lines:
I can't hear any silence or splashing.,
Your voice is invisible, your sound is invisible.
And the motionless circle breathes the sun
Behind a cloudy, loose curtain.
Because cartoons are not always fun. But during all the days of the festival, both here and on all social networks, they remembered Zhuk's favorite works, and someone just now discovered this poet.
Both the main awards (the Grand Prix of the jury and the 1st place in the professional rating) of the Suzdalfest went to the main favorite of the competition, Dmitry Geller's Alyoshenka. Just about the USSR and the alien. Alyoshenka was named after a strange creature, a Kyshtym dwarf, which was found in 1996.
So, in Geller's film, they explain that everything was wrong. It wasn't a dwarf, but a real little alien who was quietly playing tennis with his buddy somewhere in a galaxy far, far away, until his mother called him home to another galaxy far, far away. Then E.T. decided to take a shortcut, but he was stupidly knocked down by ours above the Ground. But in the Union, they looked after him, raised him, tried to play football with him, and even took him to a public bathhouse to wash. He hasn't decided yet that it's okay to visit, but Mom has already been waiting for him and will probably swear.
The aliens with their "pee-pee-pee-pee" managed to become a meme at Suzdalfest, and for the general audience, it is more important that the films of many festival participants can already be found online, and others are really worth waiting for.
Переведено сервисом «Яндекс Переводчик»
