Cartoon in progress - 20 years

[Ya Sam]

Sorry if posted before. That adaptation of Gogol's 'Overcoat' seems to be 
one of the longest ongoing animation projects.

MOSCOW -- Watching Yuri Norstein's animated film "The Overcoat," even on 
Sputnik-era reel-to-reel equipment, the viewer gets a sense of why the film, 
odd and arresting, has been 20 years in the making, and is still not 
finished.

Norstein uses a technique in which handmade figures are shot on multiple 
glass planes -- like paper dolls photographed in 3-D. He refuses to use 
computers to speed the work and he has come to be called the golden snail 
for his slow, ardent perfectionism. He is considered by many to be not just 
the best animator of his era, but the best of all time.

"I'll never use a computer," says Yuri Norstein, who disdains computer 
animation. He's been meticulously working on "The Overcoat" for 20 years.

In one scene, an insignificant, solitary man hustles through a snowscape 
that is almost liquid, shining with a murky, preternatural light. Once he 
returns to his hovel, the man scrutinizes the holes in his coat in a way 
that makes him seem alive.

No computer, Norstein insists, could generate such imagery.

Only 20 minutes of film, based on Nikolai Gogol's short story of the same 
name, have been completed since Norstein began the project in the 1980s.

Yet a quarter-century after he finished his archetypal, imagistic "Tale of 
Tales," there is renewed interest in his work in Russia and abroad.

The first exhibit of his work at the Moscow Museum of Private Collections 
this month is being followed in June by a book called "Yuri Norstein and 
Tale of Tales: An Animator's Journey," by Clare Kitson, former head of 
animation at Britain's Channel 4.

"The Overcoat," a suspenseful fable about a small, humiliated soul whose 
life and then death become a struggle for an overcoat, has taken up most of 
Norstein's middle age and now beyond. He is now 63.

The film -- in its entirety -- is eagerly and wearily anticipated, yet 
financing the project has proved as difficult as the psychological wear and 
tear of the film's theme.

"Even if the film 'Overcoat' is never finished -- and I expect it will be 
finished -- what Yuri Norstein has done is enough to be seen as the greatest 
animator in the world," says Alla Bossart, art and film critic for the 
Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta. "You won't see anything like 'Overcoat' 
anywhere else."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/30/AR2005053000982.html

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