Skaza Skazok ("The Tale of Tales")
This review was commissioned by @ArlequineLunaire.
This half-hour animated film has consistently won awards since its 1979 release, and is still considered by many media historians to be the best animated movie of all time. The international success of "The Tale of Tales" was something of a watershed moment for Soviet cartoons. The fact that the film was (ineffectually) banned within the USSR for not conforming to Brezhnev's standards of "socialist realism" also became a statement in and of itself.
Incidentally, creator Yuri Norstein is still alive, and has been working on his animated magnum opus since 1981. Legends have been circulated through the filmmaking community that when he finally finishes it with his dying breaths, it will be the best movie ever made, animation as a medium will be retired as a now-completed project, world peace will descend, the wolves will eat the sun and moon, and Azathoth will wake from his slumber and end the universe.
"Not conforming to socialist realism, or indeed any kind of realism at all" is an accurate description of "The Tale of Tales." This is the exact kind of cryptic, abstract, open-to-interpretation art that authoritarian statists have always despised. However, much more than anything else, before you get into style or themes or politics or any of that, this film is *primarily* an animation flex.
When people say that Yuri Norstein might be the greatest animator of all time, they're saying it for a fucking reason.
I was sure that the opening frames, depicting rainwater droplets collecting and trailing down across the surface of an apple, had to be live action. But, once the camera pans out a little and the flatness of the apple's stem and concave top become apparent, I realized that they weren't. Still images do nothing to capture the movements of the water droplets as they wobble from the internal forces of their own expansion, slide down the side of the apple, combine into larger droplets, and slide down faster under their own weight. You'll therefore have to either take my word for it when I tell you how shockingly real it looks, or (better yet) watch the film yourselves.
There was virtually no CGI in the 1970's. This was hand-drawn.
So too were the crackling fires, the intricate branching twigs at the end of the myriad tree-branches of the film's dark forest settings, the heart-stoppingly realistic flapping of pigeon wings as the birds abruptly fly passed the screen, and so many other things. And yet, when it's not doing this astonishing expressionist hyper-realism, "The Tale of Tales" shuffles through multiple other, much cartoonier, art styles. All with the same sharpness of motion and consummate detail, even as the nature of the motions and details shift from realistic, to impressionist, to stiff clockwork toy aesthetics to almost claymation-looking semi-grotesques and back to realism again.
It's hard to say that there's a "sequence of events," exactly. The film seems to alternate between different layers of reality, each drawn and animated in a different style, but there are a few connecting elements. In all of these animated worlds, there is a focus on children (babies and toddlers in particular), parents, and the natural world. In most of them, there are elements either obliquely hinting at or outright depicting the Great Patriotic War from the perspective of a hungry child stuck at home watching mothers and sisters wait for their husbands and brothers to come home. Or reading snippets of government notifications telling them they won't come home. And, in all of them, there's one particular character - an uncanny stuffed-animal-looking wolf - that makes some kind of presence, even if it's just nosing around in the margins.
As the war is implied to come and go, the wolf ekes out a meagre existence for itself scavenging root vegetables from empty farmhouses and warming itself by the hearth-fires of lonely old grandmothers. Whenever, in between the desolation sequences, there are children onscreen, the wolf seems to be watching them with a combination of benign curiosity and shyness.
On the topic of children, there's also a connection drawn between three child figures. A baby in its crib, being dotted over by its parents and older siblings in a relaxed bucolic setting. Another baby, realistically drawn save that its face shifts between that of an infant and of a dissonantly adult man, lost in the rain in the woods in a tiny bundle of blankets. And then a boy, perhaps four or five years old, in a postwar city, dreaming of flying through the tree-tops and making friends with the ravens while his war veteran father drinks himself into a miserable stupor and his longsuffering mother sits helplessly by.
Apparently, Nortstein claims that this film was meant to evoke the feeling of a memory. Not linear and unchanging, but associative and reconstructive. As he was born in 1941, he would only have a few memories of the wartime itself, but those would have been his earliest, most formative memories. Growing up in the traumatized postwar USSR, meanwhile, Nortstein would have been juuust about as old as the boy who dreams of being a raven, or slightly older.
The film is bookended by near-realistic sequences depicting a rain-shrouded nighttime forest, cut through by highways filled with anxious cars and tracks prowled by rushing military trains. The apple from the very beginning, implied to be the same one dropped by the boy with the alcoholic father in one of the cartoonier sequences, lays in the grass near the train tracks. Special shoutout to the fallen leaves being blown through the grass by the wake of the trains as they pass.
Between these bookend sequences, another story is told. The cartoon wolf sneaks into the home of a poet (a character most often native to the idyllic rural setting) and steals his manuscript, running across a busy highway and along the train tracks into the woods with it. As he brings it near the dropped apple, the wolf realizes that the manuscript has transformed into a crying human baby. The wolf seems dismayed at first, then perplexed as to what he's meant to do with the baby. Finally, he - with seeming reluctance - brings it deeper into the woods until he finds a crib to put it in, and starts rocking and singing the infant to sleep.
He doesn't do a very good job. When the baby starts crying again despite his best efforts, the wolf tries shaking it and singing more loudly and angrily. But he's trying. His voice - the only proper speaking part in the film - is a fatherly one, trying its best to sing a traditional Russian lullaby despite barely knowing how to carry a tune.
Baby, baby, rock-a-bye
On the edge you mustn't lie
Or the little grey wolf will come
And will nip you on the tum,
Tug you off into the wood
Underneath the willow-root.
First of all: hilariously Russian thing to sing to a baby. Like, peak Russian parenting.
Second: in context the lyrics are painfully double-edged. The wolf is trying. He didn't want this situation, but he's trying to do the best he can. One gets the impression that the home of the poet that he stole the baby-manuscript from no longer exists, and therefore there's no returning it.
Is the wolf an allegory for the alcoholic, war-traumatized father seen struggling to not ruin his son's empathy, kindness, and imagination with his PTSD in the postwar sequence? For the boy himself, now grown-up and trying to recover what little unruined childhood he can remember via his art and writing, while feeling unworthy of being a vessel for it? Both? Neither?
I don't entirely know what to make of "Tale of Tales." I'm not sure if anyone knows what to make of it with any confidence. It will definitely make you feel things, though. And it absolutely earns its reputation on visual quality alone...which, again, I still think is the main point of the piece.
