Jurij Norštejn
Biography
Yuri Norstein (born 1941) is considered an outstanding creator of animated films not only in Russia, but internationally. It happens in spite of the fact that since 1973, when he presented his first film The Fox and the Rabbit, he has finished only three films of his own authorship: The Heron and the Crane (1974), The Hedgehog in the Mist (1976) and a twenty-eight minute masterpiece, a fairytale called The Tale of Tales (1979) considered by the leading personality of British animation, John Halas, to be the best animated film made in Europe in the eighties. To these days Yuri Norstein has been working, though not continuously, on a so-far unfinished adaptation of Gogol´s novel The Overcoat.
Illustration Features
One of the main features that is typical of Yuri Norstein´s creative style is the construction of an idiosyncratically conceived space, equally open to a chance episode as to an archetype. The animal figures in his first films are from the world of fables and myths, but at the same time their "human aspect" makes them so far from it that their existence raises a whole series of questions. However, Norstein clearly feels most at horne with classical Russian realism with its humanistic aspects, though traumas characteristic of a developed industrial society are also found in his films. The tragic and the comic merge into one, without the resulting synthesis becoming grotesque. There are only few makers of classical animated films who have managed to distance themselves so far from Disney and his naive concept of a simple world like Norstein did.