The Next in Line

On the art and crises of a modern great.

A still from BoxBallet (2020)

Welcome! Thanks for checking in. It’s another Thursday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and this one takes us to Russia.

The USSR collapsed in 1991 — and much of the infrastructure for animated films went with it. Moscow’s Soyuzmultfilm, a titan, crumbled as state funding dried up. Artists fled to Europe and America. Among veteran animators, there was a feeling of emergency.

In 1993, director Fyodor Khitruk (Winnie-the-Pooh) said this:

Yuri Borisovich Norstein and I have already expressed our anxiety through the press numerous times about the fate of our animation, about the loss of professionalism in state studios, about the drain of qualified animation personnel, about the danger of severing the genetic link between generations in the profession.¹

Fear of losing that “genetic link” caused the veterans to redouble their push to train the youth. The year Khitruk spoke those words, he founded School-Studio Shar — with Norstein and their fellow masters Andrei Khrzhanovsky (Glass Harmonica) and Eduard Nazarov (Martynko).

They and many others passed down the knowledge of the 20th century. The bloodline survived as a result. After decades of work, animation slowly rose again in Russia.

That was the context, several years ago, when Anton Dyakov received his Oscar nomination for BoxBallet (2020). It was a big deal: only a few animated films from Russia have done it. And Dyakov is, himself, a Shar graduate.²

He joined the studio’s training courses in 2010, as an adult. It was a kind of mid-life crisis, he said. Dyakov’s job was in advertising, but he “began to feel this sense of futility.” He switched careers, and Shar became his “salvation.” There, he learned from greats who’d learned from greats. Dyakov became an important voice — one of the “truly talented and thoughtful” people, Norstein said in 2016.³

Although BoxBallet did well on the festival circuit, its Oscar nomination was a surprise. Dyakov’s name went all over the Russian media. “I got out of the shower and I saw that my phone was already on the floor; it had fallen from the ringing,” he said.⁴

In BoxBallet, and in Dyakov, the “genetic link” lived on. He’d made a modern classic. He was Russia’s next in line — or he should’ve been.

A snippet from BoxBallet

Another snippet from the film — watchable in full here