(A very welcome review posted on behalf of new contributor N. K. Carter.)
Famed Russian animator Yuri Norstein came to USC a couple weeks ago for a pristine screening of his animated shorts. More than anything, it was a privilege to finally see his works on film, bright and large and detailed — beautiful as they are, watching them on YouTube was like eating a five-star meal with a head cold.
Norstein is something of a DIY genius, a man who sees all of creation as ripe for shaping as clay. His characters, mostly cutout puppets, are delicate figures of texture and form, inscrutably built, existing in some fascinating limbo between two and three dimensions. Sometimes his world seems as thin as paper, and then a character makes a sudden turn, revealing depths previously unimagined. He is first among equals in a long line of Russian geniuses of animation: from the mad imagination of stop-motion pioneer and insectologist Starewicz to the nigh-impossible moving paintings of Alexander Petrov, Russia has always been blessed with masters of the form.
During the between-shorts Q&A, hastily translated for the packed audience, he talked a great deal about motion, timing and especially silence. He cited kabuki, pantomime and music as key influences on his sense of rhythm, and he claimed not to plan his timing in advance — no marking of extreme poses or key images — as if somewhere in his brain 24 frames a second is as intuitive as jazz improvisation. And maybe it is. It would certainly explain his facility for the form, the striking clarity of his comic timing and character moments.
His appeal is impressively international. Despite the brevity of his filmography — “The Fox and the Hare,” “The Tale of Tales,” “The Hedgehog in the Fog,” and “The Heron and the Crane,” and his currently in-production adaptation of Gogol’s The Overcoat, his first feature film, which has been in production for over 20 years and is barely a third complete — he enjoys something approaching critical veneration. When the Laputa International Animation Festival met to determine the 150 best animated films of all time — admittedly a ludicrous task — they gave Norstein both first and second place: second to his Soviet-era elegy for Russian culture, Tale of Tales and first to his delicate, almost numinous Hedgehog in the Fog. This is actually something of an unusual result: other international juries — such as the Olympic Arts Festival and Zagreb, while equally inclined to give Norstein top honors, usually give precedence to his longest and latest, Tale of Tales. And while Tale of Tales is a remarkable film, an ambitious, wordless, 30-minute lament for Russian culture in the face of Soviet modernity, I agree with the Laputa verdict. The Hedgehog in the Fog is as perfect as ten minutes of film can be, an effortlessly profound portrait of awe and wonder, a fairy tale without fairies that manages to be nonetheless numinous.
As the titles of his first three shorts suggest, anthropomorphic animals are Norstein’s stock in trade, and like most folkloric creatures, they are generally chatty, morally illustrative and prone to human foibles. The Hedgehog in the Fog begins much in this vein: A hedgehog goes to visit his friend Bear, with whom he passes time by counting stars. But on the way he gets lost in a fog-shrouded wood, a vast stretch of pure, untamed nature, from which the film derives much of its power. Here each creature, each hazy unknown region is capable of great beauty and great terror in equal proportions, unbowed by the dictates of narrative or moral order.
The hedgehog and the bear have modest goals: they bond over counting the stars, dividing them up into manageable portions and thus making some small contribution to the organization of the incomprehensible. This anthropomorphic concern for order and understanding mark the hedgehog and his bear off from the rest of the forest, which is in most respects far less human.
The hedgehog’s descent into the fog begins, in fact, as a matter of his curiosity: he is taken aback by the sight of a white horse whose body rises in splendor above the mists. The horse takes no notice of the hedgehog, wastes not her will on the affairs of the lesser creatures. But the hedgehog wonders: if the horse lies down to sleep, does she choke on the fog? The hedgehog goes deeper to investigate and is soon lost, never again to find the horse. Nonetheless she looms throughout the film, wandering onto the screen after the hedgehog leaves, haunting the hedgehog’s memory, a beauty, a mystery.
There is a moment in the middle of the film that summarizes beautifully the lost hedgehog’s position, as he takes a stalk upon which rests a firefly and uses it as a candle in the darkness: the music swells and for a brief moment the hedgehog appears as a pilgrim in a vigil, and it is breathtakingly lovely. For a moment it seems as if the hedgehog’s ingenuity will find him a way home. Then another firefly enters the screen and leads away the hedgehog’s own, and the fireflies dance, the music repeats, equally lovely but now more distant, and then they are gone, nothing achieved, nothing found. The forest is a world that cannot be persuaded to care one way or another about the hedgehog or his journey — though it may harm him or hurt him as it pleases, for its own inscrutable reasons. Other creatures of the forest pay a great deal of attention to the hedgehog, for reasons never quite clear to him. There’s an owl would gladly devour him, but there’s a dog from which the hedgehog cowers that wants only to return the hedgehog’s jam. Near the end of the film, the hedgehog falls into a river and resigns himself to drowning, and a creature — a Someone, as the subtitles tell us — rises from the water and carries the hedgehog on his back. The Someone requires nothing in return and tells the hedgehog nothing of his motives. Neither the hedgehog nor we, the viewers, are privileged to know what kind of creature the Someone is — A fish, as we have seen previously swimming through the river? A turtle? A minor river god? This is nature as we know it. The hedgehog, at this point in his journey, is content to let it be.
The hedgehog’s sojourn through the forest is an encounter with mystery — on the film’s own terms, a genuinely irreducible one. Though the hedgehog explores only the natural world, Norstein is able to imbue it with an almost numinous force, to put at the center of his tale something that will not be constrained by patterns of knowing. Certainly it leaves the hedgehog changed. The hedgehog and the bear are endearing but not especially deep creatures, gathering together as they do to count off the stars and have conversations that they’ve already rehearsed beforehand, everything in its proper place and order. But as the short ends, the hedgehog’s rehearsed conversation falls by the wayside and, still awestruck, he thinks about the horse — how is she, there in the fog? The image flashes across the screen again, and it is beautiful, she is beautiful, and it is hard to shake the feeling she is something more even than that.
“It is very difficult to get rid of that hard physic in film,” Norstein said towards the end of the screening. “The image is just an outer layer under which something else is hidden.”