A Hippie Animator in the Soviet Union
Armenian legend Robert Sahakyants, plus news.
Welcome! It’s time for another Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Glad you could join us.
On Thursday, we celebrated four years of this publication. It’s hard to believe that so much time has passed. To everyone whose support and readership makes this thing possible: thank you, truly.
Now, here’s our slate today:
1) The style of Robert Sahakyants.
2) Newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
1 – An animator in flux
A certain kind of artist refuses to be contained. They resist the molds. They pursue their ideas regardless of pushback — or because of pushback. And, even when it damages their own career, they defy the powerful. See Robert Sahakyants (1950–2009), one of the most renowned animators from the USSR.
In the Soviet animation scene, Sahakyants was atypical. He didn’t come from Russia, Ukraine or even Estonia: he lived in Armenia. It was a small outpost in the world of Soviet cartoons — but Sahakyants grew into a giant force. Even beyond Armenia, his work became famous with the public and among his peers.
And what defined his work back then was its surreal, psychedelic, stream-of-consciousness style. His 1975 film The Fox Book overwrote the rules of Soviet animation. Watching it, Yuri Norstein (Hedgehog in the Fog) was struck by the “incredible pressure of action inside the screen,” flowing “like lava, unstoppable.”
According to Norstein, The Fox Book had “so much action per square centimeter that sometimes the brain just couldn’t handle it.”1
In the first decades of his career, Sahakyants put everything on screen. Visual gags rushed forward, each bleeding into the next. The effect relied heavily on “transformations.” Asked in 2005 about his signature as an artist, Sahakyants replied:
In this regard, I have something to be proud of. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, when computers were not available to me, I employed a huge number of transformations, which in many ways anticipated the technique discovered later thanks to computer animation. Today, a transformation has to succeed solely through intelligence. The technical side of it has lost its interest for me personally.2
In Sahakyants’s early cartoons, the laws of physics break down. One image melts into another. Optical illusions change your impression of what you’re seeing. Characters grow, shrink, disappear and reappear. A man might try to change the channel on his mirror, only to vanish into static when his reflection changes the channel on him.
This psychedelic approach came from Sahakyants himself. He was one of the “Soviet hippies,” and his tastes drew more from The Beatles than from Moscow.
During the ‘50s and ‘60s, Sahakyants had grown up rough in Azerbaijan and Yerevan, the capital of Armenia. By 13, he was a smart but poor-scoring student who caused trouble and did things his own way. His sister wrote, “Football was his third main activity (the other two — fighting and reading books).”3
By college, he was deep into rock music and he’d developed a strong rebellious streak. Sahakyants openly disrespected professors he didn’t like. He was “accused of making anti-Soviet speeches during student meetings.”4 His grades were bad enough to get him not only flunked but drafted for a time. When he married in ‘72, his parents battled (unsuccessfully) to make him cut his hair before the wedding.
Basically, he was a firm member of the Soviet youth counterculture, a self-described hippie. Much of the art Sahakyants liked was illegal. As he remembered:
We listened to different music. In the USSR, very few people knew The Beatles. In Yerevan, you could find their recordings. Obviously not in stores, but in parallel circuits. We had photo workshops where the contents of these records were engraved on X-ray plates. In those days, listening to good music was never a problem for us. We knew The Beatles, Ringo, Lennon. And, in the ‘70s, their photos were sold everywhere on the sly despite the ban. I remember people laying them out on the ground and you could buy them.5
That was the context of Sahakyants’s career. He’d always drawn, but he entered animation as his behavior and attitude closed off other career paths around him.
In the early ‘70s, he applied to Yerevan’s state-owned Armenfilm, a studio where animation was just taking off. Told to submit samples of his work, he responded that they’d never believe he’d drawn them — he was that good. “[Art director] Valentin Podpomogov was there; he laughed and said he liked my arrogance,” Sahakyants remembered. Dressed in a loud shirt, bell bottoms and the rest, he passed the test. The story goes that someone at the studio said, “This hippie will make a great animator.”
Sahakyants soon became a director on Lilith in 1972, taking over from a “kind of bohemian artist” who’d been fired for slacking.6 He experimented with left-field elements in The Invincible (1973) and A Tale About the Snowman Darbulka (1974). But his true psychedelic breakthrough came with The Fox Book (1975).
We haven’t confirmed whether Sahakyants had seen Yellow Submarine by this point, but there’s no way he hadn’t. The Fox Book is a surreal, pop-art musical — full of collage and rapid-fire visual nonsense. According to Animation: A World History, the film was “a shock both for Armenian and international animation … the sheer number of gags and transformations were beyond belief.”
It was meant to shock. Sahakyants was 25 now, but he’d stayed a troublemaker in adulthood, leading a group of upstart hippies at Armenfilm. (One was Fox Book composer David Azarian, who’d learned his craft from underground bootleg records.) Even before the film began, there were efforts to sabotage Sahakyants behind the scenes. He and his friends assumed that their time was up, so they went all out with a bizarre “rock opera.”7
As Sahakyants later said:
We decided that no matter what we drew, we would still be persecuted, and we would not be allowed to make a film again. That’s why we chose to “slam the door hard” — to do a rock opera. Naturally, we would fly out of work (we would be fired anyway), but our entire management, which allowed such a thing to be animated in the Soviet Union, would fly out of work with us.
You could argue that The Fox Book emerged from Sahakyants’s own destructive tendencies. It’s rebellion-as-style: chaotic, hard to pin down, resistant to all the usual coherence of Soviet animation. Even the Russian narrator that was ultimately slapped over the team’s work didn’t manage to force this film into a logical shape.
Yet The Fox Book got through, somehow. According to Sahakyants, their bosses didn’t check in on them during production. “And then events developed completely unexpectedly: the management didn’t really understand, but still accepted the film,” he said. When it went before Armenia’s censorship and distribution board, it got approved again:
Gevorg Hayryan, the Chairman of the State Cinema Committee of Armenia, played no small role in this matter. After watching the cartoon, he said that he understood none of it, but he added that, at one time, he also had not understood The Color of Pomegranates by Parajanov. What if he didn’t accept our cartoon now, and afterward it turned out again that it’s Parajanov, and he’s disgraced? After that, no one tried to interfere with us anymore, and the film, which could have been my last, became a kickoff.
The Fox Book was a haphazard project, and not just in its look. The director and his friends spent many hours playing soccer instead of working. As his longtime camera operator Alice Kyurdian recalled, it pushed the deadline so tight that she and Sahakyants had to photograph at least 100 meters of the cartoon, around 50% of it, in a single night.8
Yet Kyurdian said that they made zero mistakes during that night. Whatever job he did in animation, Sahakyants was “fantastically” efficient in his work (as she put it). He was sloppy in one sense, but not in another.
The Fox Book became a hit — praised not only by Norstein but by Fyodor Khitruk (Winnie-the-Pooh). It revealed, said Khitruk, a director with a “complete and original” worldview. He made similarly glowing comments about Sahakyants’s Hunters (1977), an even odder musical successor to The Fox Book.9
The use of transformation in Sahakyants’s breakout film only got more extreme in the ones after, and Hunters is a good example. Characters’ heads suddenly morph into gun barrels and books. A donkey opens its mouth and the camera flies down its throat, which turns into a tunnel with a train inside. In many shots, the entire screen animates in a wild flow — characters and background alike.
Sahakyants was a prolific animator who was perfecting a stream-of-consciousness approach to drawing. He admitted in 2004, “I work practically without thinking, that is, I simply formulate with my hand what occurred in my head.”10
Looking back across his career, Alice Kyurdian said, “In general, Robert never did storyboards, keeping everything in his head. Some directors would panic at the loss of even one frame, but not him.” Even when his films were storyboarded, like The Fox Who Couldn’t Do Anything (1977), what was in the boards didn’t strictly match what Sahakyants animated. A straightforward sketch would melt in his hands, the shapes morphing and dancing on the screen.
These tendencies came to a head in Sahakyants’s five-part “series” of fairy tale cartoons in the ‘80s. It was a lucky break: his Nazar the Brave (1980) nearly got him blacklisted by the Armenian censorship board. The series, made to order for Soviet Central Television in Moscow, kept his career afloat.
The five installments were Three Blue, Blue Lakes of Crimson Color (1981), Who Will Tell a Fable? (1982), Wow, a Talking Fish! (1983), In the Blue Sea, in the White Foam (1984) and Wow, Butter Week! (1985). All but one were based on the fairy tales of Armenian author Hovhannes Tumanyan and, barring the last, they’re all surreal headtrips. Sahakyants cut loose. He later said, “I think these are maybe the five best films of mine.”11
Although he was fascinated by Tumanyan’s work, he was also using what he called the “Aesopian language” of fairy tales as a shield against censorship. His wife Lyulya (a major director herself) later confirmed this. The series smuggles in social commentary and his personal style of animation — and transformation.
In Blue, Blue Lakes, Sahakyants used the conceit of a dream to create a world where canes become rifles, houses become trains and geese become flies. Who Will Tell a Fable? uses tall tales to go even further out. At one point, a man hides inside a watermelon, which gets sliced into a sausage and then cranked like a meat grinder. He emerges intact from one of the slices.
Talking Fish could be the pinnacle of Sahakyants’s transformations. The villain here is Ekh, a shapeshifter who never settles into one form. In every frame, he’s changing: the spikes on his back become cacti one moment, snowy trees the next. The onslaught of puns and gags is a bit clearer in Russian — the second that Ekh describes himself as “kind” (dóbryj), for example, he morphs into Santa Claus.
The film culminates in one of the great Sahakyants sequences. As he portrays the impossible story told in Tumanyan’s original, the visual nonsense present in his work since The Fox Book reaches a new level. The transformation is so constant that it becomes its own kind of state.
The feel of this series ties back to those destructive tendencies from The Fox Book. Sahakyants never stopped rebelling: often, you sense that he’s destroying the story and screen before your eyes. This stuff is funny — but it may also be angry. The films were circulated on Union-wide TV anyway. They became his most famous works.
Later in the ‘80s, as censorship loosened and Armenia pushed for independence, Sahakyants dropped the metaphors and made viciously political films instead. As he put it, “I could no longer dwell on abstractions while millions of lives hung on life-and-death decisions made by some bastard sitting in Moscow.”12
He’d never supported the USSR — he was always part of its counterculture, from the bootleg rock music to his own transgressive, underground comix. At the same time, he’d found his future at a state-owned studio. He’d had the chance to learn animation from the veterans in Moscow, and to cross-pollinate with his peers across the Union. Many of them became good friends.13
Sahakyants was the product of a social contradiction. He seemed to understand this. “I can be accused of anything, but not of sympathizing with the communists,” he once said. Then he proceeded to praise parts of the Soviet education system.
Elsewhere, he admitted:
As a result of the short-sighted policy of the Soviet Union, we got a number of states with claims to history, borders and who knows what else. On the other side, it was in those years that cinemas, art galleries and academies of sciences appeared in all the republics. Greenhouse conditions were created for the development of art and culture.
His anger found its outlet in films funded by the same government that inspired his anger. The psychedelic absurdity, the transformations — this was all in some way subversive. He embraced the aesthetics that the people in power hated. Somehow, the state lifted up a rebel, and the rebel rose to become a star.
It hadn’t taken long for Sahakyants’s work to get weirder and less commercial than Yellow Submarine. In fact, he’d pulled it off even by the ‘70s. And he couldn’t have succeeded or likely even survived with this stuff in America, the land where his colleague David Azarian dreamed of living. His cartoons hit the wrong notes.
The work we’re left with — the career-defining animation that Sahakyants made in the USSR — sits in an uncertain place. It’s too Soviet to be American, too “Western” to be Soviet. Sahakyants himself fought for Armenian national independence but spent his whole life speaking Russian, the language he knew best. He and his films were caught in an unsettled state. The kind of state he animated so well.
This is a revised reprint of an article that first ran in our newsletter on February 1, 2024. It was exclusive to paying subscribers then — now, it’s free to everyone.
2 – Newsbits
We lost Michio Mamiya (95), composer of the Isao Takahata films Horus: Prince of the Sun, Gauche the Cellist and Grave of the Fireflies.
Nezha 2 is above $1.63 billion in Chinese revenue — and it will dethrone Inside Out 2 as the world’s highest-earning animated movie in a day or two. Cartoon Brew is live-blogging its success. (The film’s limited run in America is also going well.)
In America, Deaf Crocodile is bringing restored versions of Soviet cartoons to Blu-ray. The first volume has Mystery of the Third Planet (1981), The Return (1980) and The Pass (1988). Older gems like The Snow Queen are coming in the future.
Latvia’s Flow is up to $20 million — fantastic revenue for such a tiny production. Variety breaks down its success around the world and reports that, in its home country, Flow “has sold more tickets than any other local film” to date.
On that note: in America, Criterion is releasing a 4K edition of Flow on Blu-ray.
The singer Yasmine Hamdan, based in France, paired an intriguing piece of collage animation with her new track Hon. It comes from animator Khalil — check it out on YouTube.
American tariffs on goods made in China are set to hurt consumer imports from Japan. It’s complex, but the problem is real, as Animenomics reports.
In South Africa, an animated feature called Crocodile Dance will hunt for partners at Durban FilmMart later this year. Given that Shof Coker (Moremi, Liyana) is co-directing, we’re already watching this one.
In Britain, the BAFTAs’ animation prizes went to Wander to Wonder and the new Wallace and Gromit film.
Lastly, an old animation test for Disney’s canceled Wild Life has popped up on YouTube.
Until next time!
From Norstein’s comments in the documentary The Last Hippie of the Pink City (2010), cited several times. This is also the source for Sahakyants’s remark about slamming the door.
From Karine Sahakyants’s now-offline biography of her brother, archived here. We used it several times. (As usual, archive links may be broken in email, but work fine on the site.)
The detail about student speeches is from Sahakyants’s 2009 interview with The Interlocutor of Armenia, cited a few times.
From a 2005 video interview with Sahakyants, created and released by Aramayis Mkrtchyan. We used it a few times.
See this article, a key source.
Details about Azarian come from the Los Angeles Times. Unlike Sahakyants, he ultimately left for the States. As he said:
I imagined a world which included the best of knowledge from books, TV, film and music. That illusion, which is always better than the truth, was so great that it was always in my mind to be here, to live my illusion.
Kyurdian spoke about this in The Last Hippie of the Pink City and in an article by the magazine Design Deluxe (cited a few times).
Khitruk’s comments were recorded in the ReAnimania 2010 catalog (page 77).
From Sahakyants’s 2004 interview (alongside ballet dancer Sona Arustamyan) on the Armenian TV show “կեսից.” See it here.
From Interview with Robert Sahakyants (2001).
Sahakyants said this in Armenian International Magazine (March 1994).
For more on Sahakyants’s underground art, see Yerevan (here and here). Some of his many friends and admirers in the USSR, besides Norstein and Khitruk, included Eduard Nazarov, David Cherkassky and Garri Bardin. (In a 2016 broadcast, Bardin remembered that Sahakyants was delighted by his film Gray Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood.)
Fantastic! Thanks for writing about Robert Sahakyants (and for linking to Animatsiya). I love the research you've done (though I personally have come across a lot of it before).
I really hope the original Armenian soundtrack of "Fox Book" survives somewhere. I just can't bear to watch it with the awful Russian voice-over. Failing that, I wonder if one day AI will be good enough to seamlessly remove it and restore the sound underneath.
You've kind of glossed over his later work, but I find it no less powerful (if perhaps even less mainstream) than his earlier films.
"The Lesson" (1987) is a worthy psychedelic sci-fi with a surprisingly wholesome ending
https://animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=490
"Wind" (1988) is a powerful warning of a world gone wrong that I think is quite relevant today. It kicked off a trend that became a tendency with later films of Sahakyants' - just when you think that things on screen go any more wrong, they do. And again. And again.
https://animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=101
"The Axe" (1994) is perhaps his final film made in the style of his famous 1980s ones, and represents his frustration with what he was seeing around him, but once again cloaked in fairy tale form
https://animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=12
"I Am Armenian Too" (2000) was his final overtly political film, in which he absolutely roasts the entire Armenian political class from Independence onwards. Reportedly, it was only shown on TV once and then banned. I THINK that this was the last time he ever got state support, too, so his studio fell on lean times:
https://animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=1451
I think the "spark" went out of Sahakyants after this film - his later films mostly "phone it in" and are mostly pretty mediocre, whereas before I think he would always do his very best on each one.
"Ananas-Bananas" (2004) is, I think, the final film he made aimed at film festivals, and his final film that is any good. It uses all European languages brokenly, to make it truly international. :) However, he went digital here and his animation lost its traditional habit of transformation:
https://animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=489
After 2004, Sahakyants' films were not even mediocre, but low budget, low-effort children's animation, with seemingly no trace of his former brilliance. He released a number of 40-50 minute long educational cartoons about subjects such as animals, physics, chemistry, etc. featuring an animal protagonist teaching a child. In Armenian and also dubbed into Russian. The animation and character design are very limited and basic (the same stylistic simplification as in this 2004 film compared to his earlier ones, but even more so), and, judging from some comments I've read from Russian viewers, the science content in at least some of them is also laughably incorrect - it looks like they didn't even have anybody who was actually good at the subjects they were trying to teach check the content.
Every so often, I try to watch one of them, but always give up in disgust after a few minutes.
But it wasn't just after 2004, his 2003 feature film "Tavern" was lackluster as well, and had many of the same flaws. I was on hand to witness Robert Sahakyants' friend and fellow director Garri Bardin's reaction when he first saw "Tavern" (at a certain Western animation festival), and he was clearly very disappointed. Unlike Sahakyants, Bardin taught himself to crowdfund and managed to continue making the films he wanted independently of the state or the commercial market (even to this very day).
If you want to find the unfortunate finale to his career, they're on Youtube (you can try adding the Russian spelling of his name, "Саакянц", to the searches):
Учимся считать (2004)
Твои первые животные (2005)
В мире динозавров (2005)
Астрономия для самых маленьких (2006)
Занимательная химия (2006)
Занимательная геометрия (2006)
Физика для самых маленьких (2007)
География для самых маленьких (2007)
Всемирная история: Вавилон (2007)
Всемирная история: Древний человек (2007)
Английский язык для малышей (2008)
Азбука для малышей (2008)
Занимательная химия (2008)
Энциклопедия Всезнайки. Часть 1 (2008)
Энциклопедия Всезнайки. Часть 2 (2008)
Всемирная история. Древняя Греция (2009)
I suppose it was necessary to make money, and they probably did make money, but it was still a sad end to a brilliant career. But any full biography of Sahakyants should mention the end of the story, too.
His left his studio to his two sons, but what I've seen from them is not as original as his work. Though it is very possible that they simply don't have the freedom that he did.
Great article! Sahakyants was a huge influence for me when I was developing my CN show “Tig n’ Seek.” It’s great to see him getting a lot of recognition again 🙌🙏