Animating Out of Spite

Plus: news.

A still from Othello-67 (1967)

Happy Sunday! We’re back with more from the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This is today’s plan:

• 1) Condensing Shakespeare into Othello-67 (1967).

• 2) Animation newsbits.

This week brought a milestone for the newsletter: 30,000 people have signed up to our mailing list. Thank you all for giving us a place in your inboxes. We hope you’ll like what’s in store.

Now, let’s go!

1 – “50 seconds?!”

How much can you say in under a minute? That’s a pressing question for animators — especially in the indie world. Animation tends to succeed online when it’s quick and potent. It can be frustratingly hard to hold people’s attention.

Back in the mid-1960s, animators faced the same question — for a slightly different reason.

Montreal was revving up for its famous Expo 67. Animation was a centerpiece. “Never had Montreal, or any city for that matter,” wrote Marco de Blois for Cartoon Brew, “received such a legendary array of prestigious guests working in animation from around the world.” Chuck Jones spoke. The Czech master Jiří Trnka made a beautiful puppet set. The Hubleys debuted a new work. And there was a 50-second film contest.

Word that the contest was seeking international animators reached Fyodor Khitruk (Winnie-the-Pooh) of Moscow. Each competing film had to be “exactly 50 seconds, a time considered ‘practical’ for wide use on television and at cinemas.”¹ The restriction outraged him:

Our studio [Soyuzmultfilm] received an offer to participate in the festival, which took place within the framework of this “Expo 67.” The only condition — the film is 50 seconds long. No more and no less. When we received this notification, rage took me. Why such strange conditions — 50 seconds?! I remember I got so angry that I decided to make a film.²

That film was Othello-67.

A snippet of animation from Othello-67, embedded in full below

Othello-67 is a manic little piece about “man and his world,” as required by the contest rules. A man drives up to a machine, inserts a coin and watches an ultra-fast version of Shakespeare’s Othello. Then he drives away, his expression blank. It takes a second to realize that Khitruk has just made a joke about the contest itself.

He’d been stewing on similar thoughts. Learning about the outside world amid the political thaw of the ‘60s, Khitruk had found “not only good, but also bad phenomena,” he said. The influence of Reader’s Digest was among the bad. While traveling, he claimed he’d come across a 15-page version of Anna Karenina.

“You could read it between two tram stops and say: ‘I read Anna Karenina,’ ” he noted. It was convenient, but the story was so diminished that there wasn’t much to gain from it. As he said, the novel had been condensed into a “bouillon cube.”³

Those thoughts came back to him when the contest appeared:

When I was asked, “Do you want to participate?” I said, “God! What is this? After all, Shakespeare can be told in 50 seconds.” [They said,] “So tell it.” … I thought, “Why not? Maybe a comic book on the theme of Othello? I suppose we could.”

And so they created what is, as the title makes clear, the 1967 version of Othello. A film to watch at the stoplight, with story beats intact but without any drama, tension or statement. It ends in a mindless battle — one in which “Othello killed everyone who could be killed, everyone in the world,” Khitruk said.

Fyodor Khitruk, center, at Expo 67 — on the right is director Ivan Ivanov-Vano (courtesy of Cartoon Brew)

Concept art by designer Sergei Alimov, courtesy of the books S. Alimov: Animation, Book and Easel Graphics and Sergei Alimov: Theatre, Cinema, Graphics

Othello-67 isn’t just snide commentary on its own existence, though. It’s genuinely funny to watch this fast-forwarded take on Shakespeare — as characters appear, gesture wildly and vanish. There’s something audacious in how far it’s pushed.

And it’s a feat of mid-century cartooning, the style Khitruk had spearheaded in the USSR. He worked again with his regular art director, Sergei Alimov, who brought collage and modern design into play. Alimov wrote around this time that “the basis for the creation of an animated film should be the visual arts.”⁴ Right from the winding highway at the start of this film, you see that thinking on display.

Othello-67 makes a point, too, about engaging with complex art in an overloaded time. Khitruk felt that this problem endured past the ‘60s. Those of us in the “computer age,” he said in 2005, need to “process an enormous amount of other information.” Dedicating mental energy to the whole of War and Peace is harder than it once was.⁵

So, an interesting film. And one that shows, ironically, just how much humor and meaning can be stuffed into 50 seconds.

The Expo 67 judges took notice. There were 256 entries in the shorts contest, live-action and animated. Othello-67 was among the few near the top, nabbing a special mention (the main prize went to Health of Man by the Czech animator Pavel Prochazka). For a satire in part about the very contest it was competing in, it did well.

Othello-67 is an obscure moment in Khitruk’s career, even in Russia. He was on a hit streak at home with films like The Story of a Crime. This 50-second oddity barely registers in his oeuvre. But it holds up. And, even when there isn’t time to watch Khitruk classics like Film, Film, Film, there’s always time for this thing.⁶

2 – Newsbits

• The rapper Ka (52), a New York legend, passed away this month. He often worked with animators on his music videos, including I Love, I Need All That and one we’ve revisited again and again since 2018, Sirens.

• We lost Rieko Nakagawa (89), children’s author and Ghibli collaborator. The lyrics to Totoro’s theme song were hers, and her books inspired several Ghibli projects.

• Two Cuban classics in the Elpidio Valdés series have been restored, with more seemingly to come.

• An American story we missed a few months ago: historian Devon Baxter shared The Missing Armored Car (1958), a UPA rarity. It’s very good.

• The government of Nigeria is floating a campaign against cartoons from abroad. “We are going to replace them with local cartoons that will promote our character and culture,” said one official.

• The Worm, from Canada, has been a success for indie animated horror on YouTube. Its creator is now angling for a series, and major partners (among them Mercury Filmworks) are involved.

• Julia Pott, creator of Summer Camp Island and a fellow Substacker, is branching out of animation with the American series Paul The Bear. It’s a live-action show with puppets, produced by the Jim Henson Company.

• The American distributor GKIDS helped to put Cartoon Saloon on the map and guided The Boy and the Heron to the top of the US box office last year. Now, it’s been bought by Toho.

• Gints Zilbalodis (Latvia) did a long interview about his film Flow, whose buzz keeps building. It may have a shot at an Oscar nomination.

• Lastly, we took a visual tour of the work of Karel Zeman, a giant of Czech animation.

Until next time!

1. From the Canadian paper The Gazette (February 9, 1966).

2. See the first volume of Khitruk’s book Profession: Animator. Its section on Othello-67, an expanded reprint of a 2005 article from Film Studies Notes, is our main source today.

3. The bouillon cube language shows up in Profession: Animator and in the parts about Othello-67 from Masters of Soviet Animation (Мастера советской мультипликации, 1972).

4. From S. Alimov: Animation, Book and Easel Graphics (С. Алимов: Мультипликация, книжная и станковая графика, 1990).

5. Khitruk made the point about War and Peace in Profession: Animator.

6. Today’s lead story is a revised and expanded reprint of one we first ran on October 24, 2021.