Yuri Norstein & Francesca Yarbusova

"The divinity of cinema is in the detail."

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Yuri Norstein is not just the best animator of his era. He’s believed to be the best of all time.¹ In 1984, the international jury in Los Angeles called the Tale of Tales (1979) “the greatest animated film ever.” In 2003, Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) received the same accolade in Japan. As the wonderful

Animation Obsessive Staff

wrote about Yuri:

It’s hard to write about Yuri Norstein. For decades, he’s been the best-known and best-loved animator from Russia. Gallons of ink have been spilled about him — from Eastern Europe to America to Japan. The Ghibli Museum has exhibited his work. He counts Hayao Miyazaki among his fans. The whole world adores Hedgehog in the Fog.

I’m one of the many who adore Hedgehog in the Fog, which was released before the fall of the Soviet Union. I encourage you to watch this animation in full today. It’s about 8 minutes long and it will delight you.

“The hedgehog enters nature as if into a temple,” Yuri Norstein explained. Yuri says his love for the East rests in its fog-like quality. “If Europe is positivism, then the East is uncertainty. If you asked me what the most important principle is for me, I would say the principle of uncertainty.”

Yuri and his wife, artist Francesca Yarbusova, refuse to use computers to speed up the animation process. As a result, he has earned the nickname “The Golden Snail.” They hand paint and cut out characters, then film their movements on top of multiple panes of glass. When you see rain in his illustrations, those are photographs of real drops of rain that are cut out and moved frame by frame across a pane of glass. When you see fire, he has actually lit drawings on fire.

Because of this uncompromising approach, Yuri and Francesca have been working on their latest film, The Overcoat—an adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s short story—since 1981. They have yet to finish it, but have previewed clips on occasion. Recently, a Japanese film crew visited his studio to discuss the film and process. Below, Yuri shows the crew drawers full of characters’ hands, jackets, and raindrops in his studio.

Forty two years of working on The Overcoat. Forty two years! That’s half of Yuri and Francesca’s lifetimes. And they’ve admitted that they don’t know if they’ll ever finish the film. (In the video above, Yuri tells viewers not to hold their breath waiting.)

Still the press and fans ask. Day in and day out, the artists field questions about timing and find themselves explaining why the film isn’t ready. It’s no surprise, then, that they’ve shied away from the media.

There is, however, a secret way to get an interview with Yuri: tell him you are a dog journalist.

Photo by Mark Boyarsky, special to RBTH

Yuri still works out of the same small studio in northern Moscow where he's been filming The Overcoat since 1981. Once or twice a month on weekends, Yuri opens the studio to visitors, who pack in to buy his books, have them signed, and catch a glimpse of the living legend. (Yuri doesn’t want to take money from the state to fund his film, so he sells books and posters.²)

The studio is filled with thousands of knick knacks and paraphernalia—scissors, scraps of paper, children's drawings, pins, wires, boxes, books. As Yuri Norstein has said: “The divinity of cinema is in the detail.”

Studio visitors can buy postcards with Yuri Norstein's animated characters, as well as books, magnets, posters and other souvenirs. Photo by Mark Boyarsky, special to RBTH

Photo by Mark Boyarsky, special to RBTH

Kuzya, Yuri’s deaf dog, “is always hospitable with the studio's guests.” Photo by Mark Boyarsky, special to RBTH

Yuri will chat with studio visitors, but he avoids formal interviews. There’s even a sign in his studio telling journalists to stay away.

The renowned director made an exception, however, for a few journalists who explained they were from a dog magazine.

You can read the full interview here, translated from Russian. I pulled out a few highlights.

There are people who need no introduction: Yuri Borisovich Norshtein is one of them. More than one generation in our country grew up on his cartoons “Hedgehog in the Fog”, “The Fox and the Hare”, “Tale of Tales”. He is loved and revered throughout the world. But his dog Kuzya doesn’t know about this. He simply loves his master.

Both Yuri Borisovich and Kuzya greeted us very cordially, but as soon as we admitted that we would like to do an interview, a cloud ran across the owner’s face. The fact that we are from a dog magazine may have saved the day. Kuzya “stood up.” He wagged his tail and offered us his belly for scratching. Of course, immediately after that he disappeared somewhere deep into the studio. They were starting to fry cutlets in the kitchen. No matter, we quickly took out the camera and voice recorder...

How do you communicate with [Kuzya] if he is deaf?
He has a different kind of hearing. As the monks say, there is a third vision, a third eye. An artist hears with a different ear and sees with a different vision that doesn't follow any logic. I think that Kuzya, like our previous dog Pirate, has this sense that we cannot decipher. For example, Pirate, when we were just thinking about going for a walk with him, he will have already appeared. Or if Tanya [Yuri’s assistant] is walking with Kuzya somewhere I had previously walked, Kuzya will know that I have been there and immediately begins to worry and look around.

It sounds like Kuzya lives in paradise...
Yes, but he also creates this paradise for us. When we go to bed, he will come, first sniff you, then walk around the bed, and lie down in his spot. And that's it. Then I feel that the earth’s axis is in place, the world is stable, and victory will be ours.

Francesca Yarbusova in the studio with one of the family’s three poodles, this one likely was Martha, who Yuri explained never left Francesca’s side.

Did you get your first dog when you were an adult?
[Me and Francesca] had three poodles, three girls. One lived for a year, she had epilepsy, she was mentally unstable. And the second dog, Yunechka, lived for 14 happy years. She was absolutely ours, a dog for the family, for the children. And our last poodle, Martha, was Francesca’s dog. Martha lived 13 years. She never moved further than one and a half meters away from Francesca. She would take a blanket in her teeth to sleep next to her in the garden. When Francesca went to the store, Martha would let out a howl: “to whom did you leave me, poor me...” Martha would then look out the window from the bed and wait for Francesca. My wife practically moved to the dacha for Martha and almost never came back to Moscow.

Yuri with his assistant’s dog Pirate – © Tatyana Usvayskaya. Yuri told the dog magazine journalists that Pirate, “lived with us in the studio for 14 years. He was Tanya's dog (Yuri's assistant). [When he died,] she was deeply upset, saying, 'We agreed with him that he will live for about twenty years...' But he lived a splendid, worthy life. He was our friend, companion, accompanied us to various events, gave advice, created a special microclimate. The entire studio space belonged to him, as it now does to Kuzya. All the spots he chose at the time now belong to Kuzya."

Can you be called a happy person?
What do you mean by “happy”?

In other words: do you live in harmony with yourself?
No, not in harmony.

Looking at you, that’s hard to believe.
I would live in harmony if I didn’t have to deal with this whole nightmare.

This photo of Yuri with Kuzya, one of his dogs, was once projected at a talk in Moscow. Upon seeing it, the famed director said to the crowd: “The two people in this photograph are both dogs.”

As the two journalists from the “dog magazine” said their goodbyes to the famous director, Yuri gave them a drawing from “Hedgehog in the Fog” with a special inscription: “Isn’t it happiness—the hot breath of a dog right in your ear or when they lick your face with their tongue...”

Maybe happiness is as simple as that. Perhaps the divinity of life—as in cinema—is in the details.

Yuri Norshtein and Kuzya by Natalia Lvova

Good luck, Yuri. I hope victory is yours.

Context: 42 years

What great artworks took less than 42 years to make?

• Auguste Rodin’s “La Porte de l’Enfer” (The Gates of Hell) took 37 years to complete

• The Great Pyramid of Giza was built in 27 years

• Brahms' First Symphony took over 20 years to finish

• James Joyce spent 17 years writing Finnegans Wake

• Leonardo da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa” took 16 years to complete

• J.R.R. Tolkien spent 12 years writing The Lord of the Rings

• Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" was filmed over 12 years.

• Michelangelo finished the Sistine Chapel in… just 4 years

What’s taken longer than The Overcoat to make?

• The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris was started in the 12th century and took 300 years to be completed.

• The Sagrada Familia is still under construction 141 years since Gaudí broke ground!

• Construction on Michael Heizer’s “City” began in 1972, and took 50 years to complete. (It’s now open to the public.)

• Orson Welles’ intended “magnum opus” The Other Side of the Wind underwent a 48-year process to create (Orson spent 15 years on it before dying)

• James Turrell purchased Roden Crater in 1979—44 years ago. It’s still not open to the public.

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/30/AR2005053000982.html

2. https://www.rbth.com/longreads/animator_yuri_norshteyn/