In Flux with Robert Sahakyants

The approach of Armenia's great animator.

Art from Hunters (1977), courtesy of Yerevan

Happy Thursday! This issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter is about the style of 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 animation in the USSR. 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 what he called “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.