Hedgehog in the fog Automatic translate

The animated film “Hedgehog in the Fog” by Yuri Norstein was released by the studio “Soyuzmultfilm” in 1975 and forever divided the world into two halves - those who see it as more than a children’s fairy tale and those who mostly see it as nothing.

The cartoon has won many international awards, and in 2003 was recognized as the best ever. But how many of us wondered why?

We all love to watch cartoons, they entertain us, bring us back to the warm, carefree world of childhood. Can we say that about the cartoon “Hedgehog in the Fog”? Probably not.

No one disputes that the cartoon is in fact a philosophical parable about the search for self, the search for the absolute, the transcendent transition from the world of the living to the world of the dead and back again, the journey that each of us will one day make. But by what artistic means did the author manage to achieve such an extraordinary depth of a simple, at first glance, plot? How did the artist manage to convey the crystal clarity of basic human emotions - joy, fear, despair? Of course, a great influence on the viewer has a musical accompaniment, but the main thing, all the same, remains the artistic series of the cartoon.

The main artistic technique in creating a video sequence can be called the lack of clear contours and some primitivism of the image. Imperfection of form implies additional depth of content. At the same time, the images seem to merge with each other, clear boundaries are erased, forming a single special world, which is quite different from the usual reality. The fog is both a place of action and a separate acting character, giving the picture a volume and meaning that would be impossible to achieve in this context by other means. Perhaps this fog was the first special effect in the history of Soviet animation. The author himself said in one of his interviews that the lack of modern technical means in the artist’s arsenal makes his imagination work, which leads, of course, to the creation of special, unlike anything else artistic worlds.

Anna Sidorova