'A Film for All Times'
Plus: news.
Welcome! Glad you could join us. This is another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s the plan:
1. Why The Mitten is so special.
2. Animation newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
1. “Planned inconveniences”
You can do a lot with a few puppets and a camera — even a phone camera.
By itself, that stuff is enough to shoot a stop-motion film. Adding lights and a set gives you plenty for a full production. The rest is about thinking and execution and soul. Nail those, even on a low-key project, and you might have a gem.
The Mitten (1967) is that kind of piece. It’s a quiet story about a girl who wants a dog — and it doesn’t feel like it aims to be a classic. Even when her red mitten comes to life as a knit puppy, maybe by magic, the film keeps its ambitions small. It’s gentle, and a little funny and a little sad, and then it’s over.
The effect of it sneaks up on you, though. There’s a human warmth here, in everything, that can’t be faked. It became a classic without flash, without pretense. Yuri Norstein (Hedgehog in the Fog) isn’t a huge fan of stop-motion puppets, but he called The Mitten a “deafening discovery” and “a film for all times.”1
Norstein himself animated on The Mitten. It was made behind the Iron Curtain — in the USSR, at the venerable Soyuzmultfilm. A few years later, key members of its team would bring the Cheburashka series to life. But this one stood out in their filmographies even then. The Mitten’s designer, Leonid Shvartsman, remembered an encounter with a colleague once the short was finished:
After the screening of our Mitten, when we were leaving the cinema hall, my childhood friend Lyova Milchin rushed to me and simply kissed me. We both were moved to tears.2
The things that make The Mitten special operate on a subtle level. They’re tiny, but, together, they have power.
Director Roman Kachanov had been working with puppets at Soyuzmultfilm since the late ‘50s. He’d come to realize something in that time. To make an animated character feel alive on the screen, you need unnecessary things. Moving straight from A to B isn’t enough. This is the philosophy he brought to The Mitten — the film for which he saw all his past work as “preparation.”
As Kachanov wrote:
A live actor, a live person, makes a lot of “excess” movements, entirely without thinking about it. You sit down on a chair and instinctively straighten your clothes. You rise from a chair and — without thinking, involuntarily — shake off the crumbs clung to your clothes. You put a dot on a blackboard with chalk and automatically turn the chalk so that the dot gets thicker. But when an animator animates a drawing or a puppet, they forget about this. … And the character becomes like a moving robot that has no incidental or excess movements, nor life-like details, and the viewer subconsciously feels that there is no life in the scene. If a live actor makes these movements involuntarily, then the viewer perceives them just as involuntarily, as unconsciously. …
I call such lively details and touches “planned inconveniences.” They should be in every scene.3
In The Mitten, you sense them in every scene. There’s no naturalistic animation here (nothing moves in an everyday way), but the characters feel fully real thanks to these extra touches. As the girl climbs the stairs to her neighbor’s apartment, one arm is out for balance. When she reaches the top, she’s already starting to tie her hood under her chin. She stretches for the doorbell — and a knee bends up with the effort.
No movement just happens. Every time, it happens in an interesting way.
Late in the story, the girl pets the mitten. Norstein called it the film’s “best scene” and spoke of its “perfection.”4
It went to Maya Buzinova, the primary animator, who worked a lot on the girl and her red puppy. The subtleties that make this scene so tender are very small: a tilt of the head, for example, or the way her hand pulls back and her fingers bend after each stroke. But the emotion of it is undeniable.
Decades later, Buzinova argued that animators hadn’t gotten enough credit for films like this one — for turning “trifling scripts” into believable stories. This was difficult work, especially without computers. As she put it a few years ago:
Compared with my current colleagues, it was very difficult for us ... we did not have a screen to check the previous frame, to monitor. Everything had to be in the head. You had to begin to live the character. You had to begin to be the character. ... In The Mitten, there is just a girl and just a mitten. The key is their connection. The key is to feel that you are performing. To convey love, to convey tenderness. To convey the power of desire: the little girl wants to have a puppy. If there is no love in me for the character, I won’t perform it.
Animation isn’t all, though, that makes The Mitten work. While its script might not have impressed Buzinova, it was an important part of the process. Everything else sprang from it.
The film’s screenwriter was Jeanna Vitenzon. As the story goes, from her apartment window, she’d watched a little girl drag a mitten along the ground by a thread. She put together a draft based on that idea.
Her script landed in the hands of Anatoly Karanovich (The Bath), and he brought it to Kachanov, his protégé. “The idea of The Mitten was liked by Roman Kachanov, an amazing director and person,” said Vitenzon.5 With him, she revised it. They pulled out every line of dialogue: the story would be told in images.
Kachanov was a bulky, muscular man and a boxer. He was also a cinematic poet — Vitenzon recalled that he “could sense such subtle movements of the soul.” Many noticed this about him. “He was strong, tall, athletic. Physically unshakeable,” Norstein said in 2009. “At the same time he had a tender, almost childish soul. It was a charming contrast.”
Like Norstein explained elsewhere, Kachanov was:
… called “the Great Coffer” for his stature and heavy build. The Coffer, still, was endowed with subtlest psychoanalytical wits, great ingeniousness and sound and precise intuition about everything in this life.
Working under Kachanov on The Mitten, Norstein was struck by the director’s “ability to daydream.” Thought after thought came to him about the film, and he would interrupt his animators mid-scene to ask for their feedback.
One of Kachanov’s thoughts was to have Maya Buzinova redo the petting scene, which had already come out well. People were stunned, noted historian Georgy Borodin — and yet the next take was even better.6
Another thought was not to pre-record The Mitten’s jazzy score. Kachanov didn’t want to handcuff himself or his team to a soundtrack. In his view, timing in advance to music stifled both movement and filmmaking. He didn’t mind that the music didn’t line up perfectly.
“At one time, vast importance was attached to synchronicity. It was a time when the modesty and naivety of the story, the absence of characters or psychology in films, were offset by musicality,” Kachanov argued. The Mitten comes from a different place. It’s a story about longing, friendship and loneliness. The feelings happen in a childlike register, but adults can recognize them, too.
To design The Mitten, Kachanov brought in Leonid Shvartsman, who passed away a few years ago at age 101. He was already a legend at Soyuzmultfilm by the ‘60s, having helped to define The Snow Queen (1957) and more. The characters he created for The Mitten were some of his best, and some of his favorites.7
Shvartsman liked to base characters on real people. In The Mitten, the girl’s absent-minded mother was designed after an artist at the studio. He pulled the stern bulldog, who judges the dog show, from Kachanov. “The mighty figure, a serious pensive head without any neck, thick eyebrows, sad clever eyes,” Shvartsman said.
An interviewer once asked Shvartsman if the director had noticed the caricature. “Well, in the first place, everyone else recognized him,” he recalled, “and afterwards, naturally, he did too.”8
Whenever he designed, Shvartsman worked with the animators in mind. His drawings had to function as puppets.9 According to Maya Buzinova, he took pains to create “convenient” characters, ones that stood up well and had proper joints. Paired with his creative spirit, he was a master of his craft. “Each time I saw Liolly [Shvartsman] bending over a scene — the world seemed to me safe and stable,” Norstein said of his time on The Mitten.
With Shvartsman and Kachanov in charge, this was a project in good hands. Add in people like Norstein and Buzinova (“one of the best puppeteers of the Soyuzmultfilm studio,” noted one critic), and a quality film was almost guaranteed.10 But an unusual energy went into the production, too, as Norstein remembered:
… all of us, who took part in its creation, seemed to go a bit crazy. … A masterpiece is never planned, it is always being born by circumstances, even talent is not the main thing here. What is really important — is the point of intersection of deep emotional experiences, vivacity, creative excitement, the birth of a son into the family of Roman Kachanov and his wife’s life on the verge of dying, the feeling of fellowship and the amiable composure of Liolly Shvartsman, tilling the pictorial soil of the film as if it were his cherished vegetable garden — in his steady, unhurried, resourceful manner rich in implicit humor. Such are the bricks a film is made of. It is being filled with the heart feelings of its makers.
Again, the team knew it had done something — as shown by the kissing and crying after the film screened. The Mitten became defining for Soyuzmultfilm. “[D]espite its apparent simplicity, [it] turned out to be a new breakthrough in children’s animation,” wrote historian Sergey Kapkov.11 It won awards internationally.
A couple of years later, Kachanov, Shvartsman and Buzinova would go on to bigger things in Crocodile Gena (1969), the first entry in the Cheburashka series. But The Mitten was the foundation, and some called it Kachanov’s career high even after the success of Cheburashka.12 Here was puppet animation clearly different from the style of Czechs like Jiří Trnka, but not overshadowed by it.
The way Norstein came to move his paper-cutout characters later, in his own films, owes a lot to Kachanov’s approach — and those “planned inconveniences.” Within the tenderness of the movements in Tale of Tales (1979), or Norstein’s Good Night, Little Ones! animation, you can see films like The Mitten.
He didn’t deny it. “I can safely call him my teacher. … It is not a stretch to say that Roman Kachanov created his own school of movement in puppet animation,” Norstein admitted. “I think that without him I would hardly have become a director.”13
This is a revised reprint of an article we first ran behind the paywall on August 22, 2024.
2. Newsbits
We lost Catherine O’Hara (71). Her voice appeared in many animated projects, including The Wild Robot.
Claire Keane, a key concept artist for Tangled and Frozen, is now on Substack. She’s based in France.
Weilin Zhang is a young star in Japan’s anime industry. Last month, he wrote about his despair with the current business and the value of what it produces. “I sincerely feel that the projects that I am a part of genuinely make the world a worse place,” he admitted.
Readers with Japanese IP addresses can watch the restored films of Tadanari Okamoto, an indie legend, for free on YouTube.
There’s interesting discourse about Russia’s faltering animation field. Writer Dina Goder argued at length that things are grim: artists have left, quality is down, films are “outdated” and heavily censored. The scholar Pavel Shvedov agreed on many counts — but he still has hope, and he pleaded with the youth not to give up.
In Japan, Sunao Katabuchi (In This Corner of the World) has a short film on the way. It’s due online next month.
In other Russian news, a startling proposal would defund film festivals that lack an award category for films about the “SVO,” the euphemism for the war against Ukraine. (Also, director Alexander Sokurov and the influential Yuliana Slashcheva were removed from a major film council.)
In Britain, Little Amélie, Zootopia 2 and Arco are among the animated nominees at the BAFTAs. See the full list.
This coming week, the Animation First festival opens in America. Its retrospective on the films of Raoul Servais is a highlight this time.
A few years back, Anton Dyakov got an Oscar nomination for BoxBallet (2020). Now based in France, he’s working with a Norwegian studio to produce the film Black Box, revealed this week. See details here and the trailer here.
On that note: we wrote about BoxBallet and Dyakov’s interrupted career.
Until next time!
From the section on Roman Kachanov in Animation: A World History (Vol. 2) and Norstein’s preface to A Classic, Liolly by Name, in the Land of Animation (Классик по имени Лёля в стране Мультипликации). We’ve cited both throughout.
Shvartsman said this in Leonid Shvartsman: Master of the Image (Леонид Шварцман. Мастер образа.), another major source.
From Kachanov’s essay in The Wisdom of Fiction (1983), the source for his quotes today.
The point about perfection comes from Roman Kachanov: Cheburashka’s Best Friend (2011).
From Borodin’s blog.
Shvartsman placed the cast of The Mitten among his favorite characters in this interview.
From Kommersant.
The quote about Buzinova comes from The World of Animation by Sergei Asenin.
See the Encyclopedia of Domestic Animation.
Ivan Ivanov-Vano called The Mitten “undoubtedly the pinnacle” for Kachanov in his book Frame by Frame (1980).
See Cinema Art.
You do an immense service with every essay in giving me joy in still living, in being able to see this art, that human artistry is so remarkable, and being able to connect in a new way with the soviet films I grew up with as the child of russian immigrants. Thank you!!!
I love that film! I discovered it after becoming a Cheburashka fan!