History of Russian Animation - Russian Animation Today

Russian Animation Today

After the end of the Soviet Union, the situation for Russian animators changed dramatically. On one hand, State subsidies diminished significantly. On the other hand, the number of studios competing for that amount of money rose a good deal. Most of the studios during the 1990s lived on animation for advertisement and on doing commissioned works for big studios from America and elsewhere. Nevertheless, there were a few very successful international co-productions, e.g. Aleksandr Petrov's (former Sverdlovsk Film Studio animator) Oscar-winning The Old Man and the Sea (1999, from Ernest Hemingway's novel) or Stanislav Sokolov's The Winter's Tale (1999, from William Shakespeare's play) that earned the director an Emmy.

Soyuzmultfilm, the former juggernaut of Russian animation studios (at one time employing as many as 700 animators and other staff), was beset by corrupt administrators who sold off all the rights to all the films previously made by the studio without telling shareholders or employees. Georgiy Borodin writes of this time, "artistic work at the studio became psychologically unbearable and impossible. No one had the guarantee that come morning, he would not find his cabinet broken open, and his working table – cleared. Similar cases became almost a regular occurrence during the years of occupation. Animators who worked in other studios refused to believe the tales about the working conditions at the stolen "Soyuzmultfilm".

Despite the hardships, Natalya Lukinykh has estimated that Russian animated films won about twice as many prestigious international awards in the 1990s as Russian live-action films. As Russia's economic situation became increasingly stable, so did the market for animation, and during the last three years a number of feature-length animation films from Russian studios have emerged (e.g. Melnitsa Animation Studio's Little Longnose, 2003, from Wilhelm Hauff's fairy tale, and Solnechny Dom Studio's 2006 Prince Vladimir, based on early history of Rus' – the highest-grossing Russian animated film to date). While the Russian animation community is yet far from reaching the splendor it possessed before the end of the Soviet Union, a significant recovery is being made and it is becoming more and more clear that the revived Russian animation industry will be very different from what it was in the late 1980s. According to Andrei Dobrunov, head of Solnechny Dom, several Russian studios are currently working on some ten animated feature films.

Osobennyj, released July 31, 2006, was Russia's first CG-animated feature film. About 8 such films are now in production by various studios . At the same time, Soyuzmultfilm has partnered up with Mikhail Shemyakin and is working on Gofmaniada, a puppet-animated feature film which is deliberately being made entirely without computers.

Beginning in 2009, animation entered a new crisis as Goskino indefinitely postponed funding for all projects, and for the 2010 budget the state cut animation funding by half. The animation community reacted by appealing to the President and the public. In 2010, many of the major studios, including Pilot, were either closed or on the verge of shutting down. The vast majority of studios had relied on state support to some extent, and Goskino did not fulfill any of their contractual obligations to pay for the films that they had ordered and which the studios had already produced. In addition, Disney has been accused of using anti-competitive practices to sideline domestic Russian competition on TV channels.