LOCAL>> Lark Virtual Cinema – Making the Overcoat

PRESENTED BY STAGE RUSSIA DOCS

Yuriy Norshteyn, Russia’s most renowned animator, has crafted many brilliant works, including his award-winning Tale of Tales and Hedgehog in the Fog. He is revered by animation creators across the globe, most notably Japanese masters Osamu Tezuka, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata.

Forty years ago, Norshteyn began work on an ambitious adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat, but after completing 25 glorious minutes of the film, the project stalled and has been shelved for many years.

A Japanese film crew visited Norshteyn’s studio and found there mountains of sketches, character studies and a shooting table covered with dust. When will his much-awaited work finally be completed? Norshteyn himself talks about its current status and the anguish and passion that has gone into its creation.

Language: In Russian and Japanese with English subtitles

Yuriy Norshteyn is the most highly esteemed independent animation artist working today. Through masterfully built vignettes – lyrically nostalgic and imbued with a subtle sense of longing and loss – Norshteyn builds a landscape of intense emotional resonance. The lyrical visual poetry in his work is synonymous with his craftsmanship.

Norshteyn uses a technique in which two dimensional flat-art is shot on multiple glass planes – a painstaking frame by frame process employed less and less by modern animators as they turn toward digital image making. In opposition, every aspect of the imagery on screen in a Norshteyn film is handcrafted. His refusal to use computers to speed the work earned him the nickname ‘the golden snail’ for his slow, ardent perfectionism.

According to the Washington Post, Norshteyn is considered by many to be not just the best animator of his era, but the best of all time.