Yuri Norstein And Tale of Tales

"In June 2002 the Zagreb Animation Festival published the results of an international, four-year poll to establish the best animated film of all time. The winner was not Japanese anime, Disney, or Wallace and Gromit, but a 1979 film by Russian animator Yuri Norstein." "Yet when Tale of Tales was first delivered to Goskino, the body then responsible for all Soviet cinema activity, it had caused consternation. How, in a system still geared to the principles of Socialist Realism, where all studios' script departments teemed with KGB informants, had they ended up with this poetic, impressionistic amalgam of Norstein's memories?" "This book examines the passage of childhood memories into the film: the personal tragedies of war, the little wolf character in the lullaby Norstein's mother used to sing, the neighbors in his crowded communal flat, the tango played in the park on summer evenings. But it also looks into other influences traceable in the film: anti-Semitism under Stalin, Khrushchev's Thaw, a spell in a furniture factory, seven years as an animator on other directors' often pedestrian films, and a violent clash with the authorities over his debut film. It also offers a glimpse of the troubled production of Tale of Tales and the decisive role played by the "mafia of decent folk," Moscow's wily intelligentsia."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.