When Yuri Norstein Appeared

On a debut film.

A still from The 25th – The First Day (1968)

Welcome! The Animation Obsessive newsletter is back with another Thursday issue. This one is all about Yuri Norstein, the animation genius.

It’s a cool story this year: Deaf Crocodile brought Norstein’s films to Blu-ray. (We have an essay in the limited edition.) For America, the last big release of Norstein’s work was a DVD two decades ago. The new one makes his films more accessible than ever, pairing famous shorts like Hedgehog in the Fog with deep cuts like Children and Matches.

Also collected here is Norstein’s directorial debut, in a fine restoration. It’s a piece that many gloss over, ourselves included. He’s known for haunting, quiet film-poems like Tale of Tales — work that inspired Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki. In Norstein’s filmography, his first project sits a little uneasily.

Its title is The 25th – The First Day (1968), and its subject is the revolution of 1917. At a glance, it looks like raw propaganda. We watch the proletariat rise up — its bodies form a red wave of energy that overwhelms the tsarists, and the rounded capitalists in their top hats. Lenin appears; red flags fly. Soviet force triumphs and the music of Shostakovich blares.

There’s no plot, and none of the warm characterization you know from Norstein: the hedgehog and little wolf are wholly absent. By Norstein’s account, The 25th runs on “movement in harmony with the tempo of the music.” He calls the film a “revolutionary étude.”¹

Yet higher-ups in the Soviet Union didn’t see The 25th as conformist propaganda. In its day, it was subversive — thoroughly criticized and partially censored. Only backdoor dealing seems to have saved the film from total obscurity.²

This outrage didn’t come from nowhere. The 25th is more layered than it looks today. In fact, historian Georgy Borodin has argued that the film is “not about the Great October” at all, but is really an exploration of Norstein’s own feelings about an “epoch” long past.³

Stills from The 25th – The First Day — see it in full via Animatsiya

Norstein, far left, during the making of Lefty (1964). On the far right is art director Arkady Tyurin. Courtesy of Frame by Frame.