Lanny-yap: Yuriy Norshteyn | Hedgehog In The Fog

29 March 2011

Yuriy Norshteyn | Hedgehog In The Fog

It’s a little-known fact outside Russia that Soviet-era (namely Cold War-era) cartoons are something of a sight to behold. Unlike their Western counterparts, animators working for the influential Moscow-based Soyuzmultfilm animation studio were not constrained by commercial concerns (the success or failure of a film had no bearing on an animator’s paycheck), and were therefore free to experiment with styles and techniques that would otherwise be considered commercially precarious.

A perfect example of the end-result can be found in Yuriy Norshteyn’s “Hedgehog in the Fog.” Considered by many to be one of the greatest animated films of all time — Hayao Miyazaki is reportedly a big fan — the 1975 Soyuzmultfilm classic tells the tale of a curious hedgehog who stumbles upon a thick fog and decides to explore its mysteries.

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Absurdity, ambiguity, anomalies, bacon, behavior, bonobos, brain science, consciousness, conversation, design, evolution, expressive arts, extremes, food, frontiers, gadgets, hermetics, humor, ingenuity, irony, maps, martinis, mental health, monkeys, mysteries, mysticism, nonsense, oddness, paradoxes, phenomenology, rocks, semantics, sf, social justice, spirituality, technology, tilt-shift and time-lapse, the visual presentation of data, anthropo-, bio-, eco-, etho-, ethno-, psycho- and sociology

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29 March 2011

Yuriy Norshteyn | Hedgehog In The Fog

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