I just want to say this: I discovered "Animation Obsessive" just a week ago, and I want to thank you for a fantastic resource, so well written and so full of things to discover and enjoy. Please continue for a long while.
I missed my opportunity to raise a grove and leave a living gift for all the strangers I'll never meet. But now I'm inspired to leave a much shorter path to a bequest l
Feb 20, 2023·edited Feb 20, 2023Liked by Animation Obsessive Staff
Thanks a lot for writing about "The Man Who Planted Trees" - it's one of my favourites and one of those one-creator visionary masterpieces in animation (like Petrov's "The Old Man and the Sea" or Gavrilko's "The Sword"). I never knew how the technique was done exactly, though I suspected it was something like paint-on-cell.
And yes, those fellows at the Dovzhenko Center and the @ukrainiananimation2186 Youtube channel have been doing a great job of restoring a lot of older Ukrainian cartoons - really impressive, especially considering the war. It seems to have actually picked up pace with the war, whereas before the situation wasn't so great - I wonder if some Western money came in. Unfortunately they don't translate them, but I and some others have been filling in that gap by adding subtitles to a lot of them over at https://www.animatsiya.net/studio.php?studioid=7 (whenever possible, we've been adding the newly restored videos). One of my favourite overlooked gems they've recently restored is the 1994 "Yulia's Birthday" - https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=1091
That article you linked to is informative but some of what it says should also be taken with a critical eye, given that there's an understandable incentive to portray history from a certain light right now. As far as I can tell (though I may be wrong), the cartoons from Ukraine weren't "redubbed into Russian", but simultaneously made and released in both languages. From comparing both versions of a lot of films, it seems to me that just as much attention paid to the voices in each version (or even more to the Russian one, since it would usually have a wider distribution across the whole USSR - as they mentioned in the article when writing about "Why the Rooster Wore Short Pants" and how people hadn't seen the Ukrainian version before). Obviously, there are examples where one or the other version will be better. But it wasn't like the situation in Armenia or Latvia, where there seems to have been much more separation between the "domestic" and "export" films, and for the "domestic" ones any translation seems to have an afterthought, often just a voice-over by some bored man, totally ruining the flow of any music or rhythm - for example, Robert Sahakyants' brilliant early Armenian musical "Fox Book" was really butchered, and to this day only has an awful Russian voice-over soundtrack - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGMKLcSzvn0
The situation in Ukraine changed in 1991 or so, when the studio stopped making high-quality Russian-language versions and instead started doing low-effort voice-overs (a great example being Irina Smirnova's 1995 "Insolent Goat" - the Russian version was so poorly-done I didn't even add it to the site. Some Russian TV channels even preferred to play a music-only version, though that made the film rather more abstract than it really had to be).
The article also makes it sound as if the early Ukrainian animated productions of the 1920s and 1930s were unjustly censored and lost, when in fact the majority of Soviet animation as a whole (including Leningrad and Moscow) from those years is lost, including a number of its most famous works (such as the colour and sound versions of Tsehanovskiy's 1929 "The Post"). Browse animator.ru by year in the early 1920s and 1930s, and you'll see that the majority of entries say "Film has not survived". Before the mid-1930s, politics was the predominant genre in Soviet animation, and it could be subject to some heavy-handed government interference (e.g. the final part of Aleksandr Ptushko's 1932 "The Master of Everyday Life", which is suddenly bereft of the subtlety and humour so prominent in the rest of the film). Most of the surviving fragments of early 1920s & 1930s Ukrainian animation recently uploaded to Youtube are quite heavily political, and the few that I've seen that aren't (e.g. the 1934 "Murzilka" cartoon) aren't really very good. The actual centres of Soviet quality in animation in those years were in Leningrad (Lenfilm) and to a lesser extent in Moscow (Mosfilm, Mezhrabpomfilm).
It's definitely one of the greatest -- glad to cover it. The Old Man and the Sea is on the list for some point in the future as well.
Thanks as always for your dedication to making Eastern European animation available to international viewers. We'd just come across this scanning project, but it only makes sense that you and the translation community have already been mining it. Very cool.
As for the article, that's a fair point about the slant to its history. We weren't endorsing all of its claims -- more pointing people in the direction of a story about film preservation. You're absolutely right about lost Soviet animation as a whole: it was a problem everywhere in the USSR, even for high-profile Russian stuff.
As for redubbing, Ukraine was quite possibly different, but what we've read about Estonian animation suggested that films were made in the local language and then, if they received a good enough grade from the review/censorship boards, translated into Russian for wider distribution across the USSR. That might not have been a universal practice, though. Either way, it does feel like it happened in Armenia -- sometimes with awful results, as you mentioned. The case of The Fox Book is one we're all too familiar with. (Something that excited us most about the existence of these Ukrainian versions was that there could be an original Armenian copy of The Fox Book hiding somewhere.)
In any case, thanks very much for the in-depth comment and context! It's appreciated, as usual.
Feb 21, 2023·edited Feb 21, 2023Liked by Animation Obsessive Staff
"The Old Man and the Sea is on the list for some point in the future as well."
Glad to hear it!
"Ukraine was quite possibly different"
My impression is that it was a lot more integrated into the wider distribution system than the Baltics or Armenia, at least in the last 2 decades. For example, I've never heard of a Ukrainian-language version of David Cherkasskiy's animated feature "Treasure Island" - I wonder if one exists (it might have required a huge amount of re-animation of the text in the film, as well as re-recording the numerous songs). While most of their production was released in two versions, more people living in Ukraine at the time seem to have understood and used Russian than Ukrainian (Aleksandr Tatarskiy quipped in his 1986 article "Making Animation" of how "perfect Ukrainian could as yet be found only in schoolbooks"). But to track down the real situation, I'd probably need to find the right books or people...
Estonia and the Baltics in general were always a lot more culturally separate, which is really obvious if you look at their animation and compare it to the Soviet "mainstream" from the same years (only in the late 1980s was there a brief period of semi-convergence). Armenia too, although at least in the early 1980s Armenfilm also made some cartoons in Russian with no Armenian versions (the well-known ones by Robert Saakyants that became really famous). I am very much hoping that the original soundtrack of "Fox Book" is one day found, but several things are discouraging: If it was possible to find, I assume that the Sahakyants studio would have found it (since they spent money on the restoration of some of those old cartoons), but instead they uploaded that awful dubbed one to Youtube. Also, Armenia is currently a resource-poor country that nobody finds politically useful, so they have no real money coming in from anywhere. In poor countries, restoration of old animation tends to be pretty far down on the list of priorities.
The voice-overs weren't always done badly - for example, the actor & animation director Garri Bardin was a great friend of Robert Saakyants and did the Russian narration for some of his films. They're about as good as you're going to get with that sort of thing.
Really appreciate this added context -- studying the way this stuff worked is so complicated. This fills in a lot of blanks.
We'll just have to cross our fingers that The Fox Book turns up one day. If there's one promising sign, it's the small push in Armenia to restore and document some of this old animation recently, including an exhibition of the film "Hunters" last year: https://evnmag.com/articles/fsio.html
Thank you! Having the chance to introduce more people to Back's work is a joy. Thanks as well for the tip about Matsumoto -- it seems the story broke right after we did our news collection this week and we missed it. We'll be sure to mention it in the next news roundup.
I love trees, but I can't understand, why peole plant trees, OK, it sounds soo good, saving the world bla bla bla.
Better Alternative: Just do nothing, and they will grow !
Either there were trees before like in the Sahel zone, there was a wonterful documentary from arte 'Der Waldmacher' . An australian guy, who learned and teached this method in Africa. After I linked it in a 'climate critic' article, arte depublished it and only previews are left, what a pitty. But check it, maybe in your region . . . or buy it.
And if there was nothing, let the gras grow, it will irrigate itself from the air, so other plants will grow and then bushes will grow and then trees.
Doing nothing is not only less work, but the plants and trees can choose the very spot, where they actually want to grow. Imagine, you plant a tree kid at a place, it did not choose and it wouldn't choose, can't get away, has to stay there, might look good for you ignorant, but for the tree it's lifelong torture !
Beautifully done! I've always loved The Many Who Planted Trees and it's nice hearing more about the story behind it.
Thank you so much! We had no idea before we started researching it just how deep this story went. It was awesome learning more -- glad you liked it!
I just want to say this: I discovered "Animation Obsessive" just a week ago, and I want to thank you for a fantastic resource, so well written and so full of things to discover and enjoy. Please continue for a long while.
-Christian
Thank you, Christian! It's great to know you're enjoying the newsletter so much.
Thanks for showing me how to use animation to captivate and teach old geezers like me. This was a wonderful experience. Thanks for the education. 🙂
Haha, you're more than welcome, Mike! It's wonderful to know that you enjoyed the film.
I missed my opportunity to raise a grove and leave a living gift for all the strangers I'll never meet. But now I'm inspired to leave a much shorter path to a bequest l
I'll leave for all who find it.
Thanks a lot for writing about "The Man Who Planted Trees" - it's one of my favourites and one of those one-creator visionary masterpieces in animation (like Petrov's "The Old Man and the Sea" or Gavrilko's "The Sword"). I never knew how the technique was done exactly, though I suspected it was something like paint-on-cell.
And yes, those fellows at the Dovzhenko Center and the @ukrainiananimation2186 Youtube channel have been doing a great job of restoring a lot of older Ukrainian cartoons - really impressive, especially considering the war. It seems to have actually picked up pace with the war, whereas before the situation wasn't so great - I wonder if some Western money came in. Unfortunately they don't translate them, but I and some others have been filling in that gap by adding subtitles to a lot of them over at https://www.animatsiya.net/studio.php?studioid=7 (whenever possible, we've been adding the newly restored videos). One of my favourite overlooked gems they've recently restored is the 1994 "Yulia's Birthday" - https://www.animatsiya.net/film.php?filmid=1091
That article you linked to is informative but some of what it says should also be taken with a critical eye, given that there's an understandable incentive to portray history from a certain light right now. As far as I can tell (though I may be wrong), the cartoons from Ukraine weren't "redubbed into Russian", but simultaneously made and released in both languages. From comparing both versions of a lot of films, it seems to me that just as much attention paid to the voices in each version (or even more to the Russian one, since it would usually have a wider distribution across the whole USSR - as they mentioned in the article when writing about "Why the Rooster Wore Short Pants" and how people hadn't seen the Ukrainian version before). Obviously, there are examples where one or the other version will be better. But it wasn't like the situation in Armenia or Latvia, where there seems to have been much more separation between the "domestic" and "export" films, and for the "domestic" ones any translation seems to have an afterthought, often just a voice-over by some bored man, totally ruining the flow of any music or rhythm - for example, Robert Sahakyants' brilliant early Armenian musical "Fox Book" was really butchered, and to this day only has an awful Russian voice-over soundtrack - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGMKLcSzvn0
The situation in Ukraine changed in 1991 or so, when the studio stopped making high-quality Russian-language versions and instead started doing low-effort voice-overs (a great example being Irina Smirnova's 1995 "Insolent Goat" - the Russian version was so poorly-done I didn't even add it to the site. Some Russian TV channels even preferred to play a music-only version, though that made the film rather more abstract than it really had to be).
The article also makes it sound as if the early Ukrainian animated productions of the 1920s and 1930s were unjustly censored and lost, when in fact the majority of Soviet animation as a whole (including Leningrad and Moscow) from those years is lost, including a number of its most famous works (such as the colour and sound versions of Tsehanovskiy's 1929 "The Post"). Browse animator.ru by year in the early 1920s and 1930s, and you'll see that the majority of entries say "Film has not survived". Before the mid-1930s, politics was the predominant genre in Soviet animation, and it could be subject to some heavy-handed government interference (e.g. the final part of Aleksandr Ptushko's 1932 "The Master of Everyday Life", which is suddenly bereft of the subtlety and humour so prominent in the rest of the film). Most of the surviving fragments of early 1920s & 1930s Ukrainian animation recently uploaded to Youtube are quite heavily political, and the few that I've seen that aren't (e.g. the 1934 "Murzilka" cartoon) aren't really very good. The actual centres of Soviet quality in animation in those years were in Leningrad (Lenfilm) and to a lesser extent in Moscow (Mosfilm, Mezhrabpomfilm).
It's definitely one of the greatest -- glad to cover it. The Old Man and the Sea is on the list for some point in the future as well.
Thanks as always for your dedication to making Eastern European animation available to international viewers. We'd just come across this scanning project, but it only makes sense that you and the translation community have already been mining it. Very cool.
As for the article, that's a fair point about the slant to its history. We weren't endorsing all of its claims -- more pointing people in the direction of a story about film preservation. You're absolutely right about lost Soviet animation as a whole: it was a problem everywhere in the USSR, even for high-profile Russian stuff.
As for redubbing, Ukraine was quite possibly different, but what we've read about Estonian animation suggested that films were made in the local language and then, if they received a good enough grade from the review/censorship boards, translated into Russian for wider distribution across the USSR. That might not have been a universal practice, though. Either way, it does feel like it happened in Armenia -- sometimes with awful results, as you mentioned. The case of The Fox Book is one we're all too familiar with. (Something that excited us most about the existence of these Ukrainian versions was that there could be an original Armenian copy of The Fox Book hiding somewhere.)
In any case, thanks very much for the in-depth comment and context! It's appreciated, as usual.
"The Old Man and the Sea is on the list for some point in the future as well."
Glad to hear it!
"Ukraine was quite possibly different"
My impression is that it was a lot more integrated into the wider distribution system than the Baltics or Armenia, at least in the last 2 decades. For example, I've never heard of a Ukrainian-language version of David Cherkasskiy's animated feature "Treasure Island" - I wonder if one exists (it might have required a huge amount of re-animation of the text in the film, as well as re-recording the numerous songs). While most of their production was released in two versions, more people living in Ukraine at the time seem to have understood and used Russian than Ukrainian (Aleksandr Tatarskiy quipped in his 1986 article "Making Animation" of how "perfect Ukrainian could as yet be found only in schoolbooks"). But to track down the real situation, I'd probably need to find the right books or people...
Estonia and the Baltics in general were always a lot more culturally separate, which is really obvious if you look at their animation and compare it to the Soviet "mainstream" from the same years (only in the late 1980s was there a brief period of semi-convergence). Armenia too, although at least in the early 1980s Armenfilm also made some cartoons in Russian with no Armenian versions (the well-known ones by Robert Saakyants that became really famous). I am very much hoping that the original soundtrack of "Fox Book" is one day found, but several things are discouraging: If it was possible to find, I assume that the Sahakyants studio would have found it (since they spent money on the restoration of some of those old cartoons), but instead they uploaded that awful dubbed one to Youtube. Also, Armenia is currently a resource-poor country that nobody finds politically useful, so they have no real money coming in from anywhere. In poor countries, restoration of old animation tends to be pretty far down on the list of priorities.
The voice-overs weren't always done badly - for example, the actor & animation director Garri Bardin was a great friend of Robert Saakyants and did the Russian narration for some of his films. They're about as good as you're going to get with that sort of thing.
Really appreciate this added context -- studying the way this stuff worked is so complicated. This fills in a lot of blanks.
We'll just have to cross our fingers that The Fox Book turns up one day. If there's one promising sign, it's the small push in Armenia to restore and document some of this old animation recently, including an exhibition of the film "Hunters" last year: https://evnmag.com/articles/fsio.html
This is why I love AO. I've been a huge animation fan for a long time but I've never heard about SO many of these legendary artists.
P.S. not sure if you missed it, and I know you can't cover EVERYthing but Leiji Matsumoto passed away on the thirteenth
Thank you! Having the chance to introduce more people to Back's work is a joy. Thanks as well for the tip about Matsumoto -- it seems the story broke right after we did our news collection this week and we missed it. We'll be sure to mention it in the next news roundup.
I love trees, but I can't understand, why peole plant trees, OK, it sounds soo good, saving the world bla bla bla.
Better Alternative: Just do nothing, and they will grow !
Either there were trees before like in the Sahel zone, there was a wonterful documentary from arte 'Der Waldmacher' . An australian guy, who learned and teached this method in Africa. After I linked it in a 'climate critic' article, arte depublished it and only previews are left, what a pitty. But check it, maybe in your region . . . or buy it.
And if there was nothing, let the gras grow, it will irrigate itself from the air, so other plants will grow and then bushes will grow and then trees.
Doing nothing is not only less work, but the plants and trees can choose the very spot, where they actually want to grow. Imagine, you plant a tree kid at a place, it did not choose and it wouldn't choose, can't get away, has to stay there, might look good for you ignorant, but for the tree it's lifelong torture !