'Planned Inconveniences'

The simple grace of 'The Mitten.'

A still from The Mitten (1967)

Happy Thursday! Glad you could join us today. The latest edition of Animation Obsessive is about an understated gem called The Mitten (1967).

In the ‘60s, Czechs like Jiří Trnka made many of the world’s finest stop-motion films. Not all of the greats were theirs, though. New things were emerging in Moscow: another group of stop-motion masters. The Mitten helped to prove it.

A young Yuri Norstein (Hedgehog in the Fog) animated on this film. Just a few years later, its director and designer would bring the Cheburashka series to life. The simple brilliance of The Mitten stood out in their filmographies even then. Norstein himself, usually no fan of stop-motion puppets, called it a “deafening discovery” and “a film for all times.”¹

This quiet story, about a girl who wants a dog, 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 simplicity doesn’t dull the effect. The Mitten’s designer, Leonid Shvartsman, remembered an encounter with a colleague once the film 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

Stills from The Mitten (1967), embedded above