An award-winning animation feature by Yuri Norshtein. Winner of the following awards:
- Outstanding Film of the Year (London UK 1977)
- Winner of 2nd Prize (Sydney Australia 1978)
- Winner of 3rd Prize (Chicago USA 1977)
- Tokyo All time animation best 150 in Japan and Worldwide: Hedgehog in the Fog “№1 Animated film of all the time” (2003)
This animation is really excellent. Suddenly, I’m curious about Russian animation, and I find “Polygon”:
An animated film by Anatoly Petrov of 1978. An outstanding feature in term of realistic technique. It won the following prizes:
- Official Selection Oberhausen, Germany 1979
- First Prize Yerevan, USSR 1978
Ah – it becomes clear that these are both from the same production studio: Soyuzmultfilm. From Wikipedia:
Soyuzmultfilm (Russian: Coюзмультфильм, translated as Union Animation) is a Russian animation studio based in Moscow. Over the years it has gained international attention and respect, garnering numerous awards both at home and abroad. Noted for a great variety of style, it is regarded as the most influential animation studio of the former Soviet Union.
…and continuing:
The Studio was founded in 10 June 1936 under the name Soyuzdetmultfilm (Союздетмультфильм – abbr. from Union Children’s Animations). The name was changed to Soyuzmultfilm on 20 August 1937. Initially comprising only a few scattered workshops, Soyuzmultfilm grew quickly, soon becoming the Soviet Union’s premier animation studio. The studio produced exclusively traditional animation until 1954, when a “puppet division” was founded and the first stop motion-animated film released. The puppet division would later also make cutout-animated films.
During the Soviet era, the studio employed a maximum of over 700[1] skilled labourers and released an average of 20 films each year (the highest number was 47, in 1973).
The 60s, 70s and 80s saw the release of many films whose characters became an integral part of Soviet culture: Winnie-the-Pooh (Винни-Пух), Crocodile Gena (Крокодил Гена), Karlsson-on-the-Roof (Карлсон, который живёт на крыше), The Musicians of Bremen (Бременские музыканты), Three from Buttermilk Village (Трое из Простоквашино), Nu, pogodi! (Ну, погоди!), Hedgehog in the Fog (Ёжик в тумане), The Mystery of the Third Planet (Тайна третьей планеты) etc.
The variety of animation styles and the unprecedented degree of artistic freedom given to its many animators made Soyuzmultfilm perhaps the most diverse of the world’s major animation studios.
Soyuzmultfilm’s creativity was fueled in part by the unique conditions of the Soviet Union which made it possible for the studio to disregard the commercial appeal of its films. Because animators were paid by the Academy of Film regardless of how well or how poorly their products sold (though they were not, in fact, “sold”), they were free to pursue their artistic vision without giving a thought to finances.
This is finally the “Bretton Woods III” talk, and it’s interesting what sorts of things have developed, among them, the apparent “new world order” that people have been talking about for so long. It will probably take a little while to sort through everything that happened, but it’s clear that money is going to behave differently in the middle-term future…
Okay – this isn’t really much of a stretch, since there have been food riots constantly for several years now… but you heard it here, folks. Tough economic times push those commodities speculators to bet on higher prices, even though petrol is at the lowest price in almost a decade.
Food commodity prices this year will remain above historical levels, hitting poor countries for the third year in a row, according to the US department of agriculture.
The forecast at the USDA’s annual conference in Washington points to lower prices than in the first half of last year, when the cost of commodities such as corn, wheat, soyabean and rice hit all-time highs.
Joseph Glauber, USDA chief economist, said the impact of the economic crisis on food consumption would depress agriculture commodity prices temporarily, but he warned that prices would remain well above average for the eight years since 2000.
Mr Glauber told the Financial Times that the outlook was “for a return to higher prices” as some of the pressures that drove last year’s increases and relatively strong growth in emerging markets “will return to play a major role” this year or in early 2010. “This is going to be again a tough year [for poor countries],” he said.
WAT? I told you! Didn’t I tell you? As recently as two months ago, we were discussing Guinea Coups on RTFA. Now, the (former) president has been assassinated, and the region is in unrest.
Sure, this isn’t a coup… sure, the military promises to respect democracy…
But all the same, the president is dead at the hands of a group of soldiers, and the meme lives on.
[UPDATE 2009-03-03]
Erm, whoops. Wrong Guinea. The post from two months ago was Equatorial Guinea, but the current article is Guinea-Bissau (neither of which should be confused with the Republic of Guinea). [/UPDATE]
Renegade soldiers killed the president of Guinea-Bissau just hours after a bomb blast led to the death of his rival, according to senior government officials.
President Joao Bernardo Vieira died early Monday morning, Luis Sanca, security adviser to Prime Minister Carlos Gomes Jr., confirmed for the Associated Press. Sanca declined to provide further details on the death.
Gunfire had been heard around the presidential palace in the capital of Bissau for several hours overnight in the fragile West African nation, according to witnesses. But the capital was calm on Monday, officials said.
Vieira had ruled Guinea-Bissau for 23 of the past 29 years. He came to power in a 1980 coup, but was forced out 19 years later at the onset of the country’s civil war. He later returned from exile in Portugal to run in the country’s 2005 election and won the vote.
Under the constitution, parliament chief Raimundo Pereira succeeds the president in the event of his death.
The Portuguese news agency LUSA reported that troops attacked Vieira’s residence with rockets and rifles on Sunday night.
Troops closed roads around the armed forces building in Bissau on Sunday and a blast apparently destroyed part of the building, according to the BBC.
Gideon Rachman had a dream… more, a nightmare, but presumably it happened while sleeping, so “dream” will be a fine name for it.
Now, it will keep me awake all night, preventing me from sleeping, and this will be the nature of my waking nightmare. The closing lines are … plausible, and I truly hope it never comes to be.
It is November 7 2012. At three in the morning, an exhausted-looking President Barack Obama appears before weeping supporters in the ballroom of the Chicago Hilton and concedes defeat. The euphoria of his victory-night speech in Grant Park four years earlier is a distant memory. The Obama administration has been overwhelmed by America’s economic problems. Sarah Palin is the new president of the US.
Elected on a ticket of populism at home and nationalism overseas, President-elect Palin starts to take congratulatory phone calls from foreign leaders. First on the line is Avigdor Lieberman, the prime minister of Israel; then comes President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Five different leaders claiming to speak in the name of the European Union try to place calls – but they are all put on hold. As for the Chinese leadership, the new president is not speaking to them. How could she, after she has campaigned against the “communist currency manipulators of Beijing”?
The Chinese have resisted the temptation to call Mrs Palin a “capitalist running dog”. But Maoist language is creeping back into Chinese official discourse, as the country struggles to adjust to the collapse and closure of its export markets. Alarmed by the large number of unemployed in the cities, the Communist party has abandoned plans to privatise rural land and invested heavily in public works in the countryside and new collective farms. This policy is swiftly dubbed “the Great Leap backwards”.
The world event that had most damaged Mr Obama was Iran’s successful test of a nuclear weapon in 2011. The Republicans had hammered home their message that Mr Obama was “a second Jimmy Carter”, who had been duped by hopes of striking a grand bargain with Iran.
The Iranian nuclear test had also driven Israeli politics even further to the right and set the stage for the rise of Mr Lieberman. His campaign slogan in the 2011 election – “bomb them while they are on the toilet” – was borrowed from Mr Putin and chanted gleefully by Mr Lieberman’s Russian-speaking supporters.
David Anderson: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!After struggling for days to get OpenOffice to download and work on my Mac Mini, only to find that the official version only works on the Intel model...
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