Yuri Norstein’s Сказка сказок & Ёжик в тумане / Tale of Tales and The Hedgehog in the Fog

Yuri Norstein is a giant of animation, and so seminal are Tale of Tales and The Hedgehog in the Fog that quite frankly I am ashamed of never having seen them until last year. Today, I rewatched The Hedgehog in the Fog and remembered just how brilliant it was. Indeed, 29 years since his last animated release (not counting his 2-minute segment of the Winter Days project), I feel it’s high time he got a move on with The Overcoat...

All jokes aside, as I’ve mentioned before, I regard it as a shame that so many fans of animation are tribal and tend not to stray beyond their devotion to, for example, Disney or anime. On the other hand, once one is aware of Norstein’s work, his stature becomes more obvious. Along with Paul Grimault, Miyazaki Hayao has cited Norstein as a great influence, international polls often put these two titles at the top of ‘best animation of all time’ lists and the wolf from Tale of Tales even cameos in an episode of Sayonara Zetsubou-Sensei.

Norstein’s animations are grim, almost devoid of colour but complex to look at, and are capable of that kind of empty, plaintive storytelling that to the viewer seems profound and beautiful. While Tale of Tales is the more serious, weighty and symbolic of the two, my personal preference is for the coherence and simple storytelling of The Hedgehog in the Fog, which creates its strange atmosphere through direction and art rather than disconnected segments. The latter’s story follows a little hedgehog who, concerned about a horse, goes into a frog, is startled by various encounters in the strange world there, but is ultimately aided by weird but good-hearted creatures and is reunited with his friend the bear cub, whose voice actor delivers one of the best performances I’ve ever heard in no more than a handful of lines. Tale of Tales, conversely, makes a degree of sense following the little wolf, but otherwise it is mostly strange snatches of skipping bulls, apples and soldiers. Both, rather like poems, can bring strong emotions with just the slightest impressions, but I find elements of the lack of story and bizarre imagery to be overly simplistic and without symbolic power, rather than the other way around. I have never been keen on images which may mean numerous profound things, because it is equally probable, if not more so, that they mean nothing at all. This is likely because I put more emphasis on the storyteller’s intentions than my subjective interpretation.

But it is undoubtedly the uncanny mood of Norstein’s cut-out animation, moving between several layers of glass with different textures upon them, that makes him so prominent. Take the exact soundtrack and storyboard and animate in Disney’s style and see if you get the same impact. Norstein is a master of mood, of his own strange aesthetic, and of pitching animation to be both cute and unsettling. And these are no small feats. Essential viewing.