THE MASCOT CINEMATIC UNIVERSE (PART ONE)
by Francis Friel
Ladislas
Starevich is my favorite animator. The Mascot is my earliest
stop-motion memory along with that goof Gumby, both of which used to run as
part of the Saturday morning lineup when I was a little kid. It was one of a
bunch of shorts that used to run as part of the lead-in to Star Stuff, a locally-produced (in early-80s Philly) sci-fi series
about a little boy on Earth whose best friend is a little girl living in outer
space (and, somehow, in the future). They’d watch Laurel & Hardy movies
together and sometimes cartoons, so I’d always lump Laurel & Hardy and
Gumby and The Mascot together in my
head, along with another cartoon called Prest-O Change-O (featuring an early
appearance of the character that would later evolve into Bugs Bunny). Weird,
surreal stuff to be playing at 6am for children. I’d had such fond memories of
these bizarre little cartoons and it was shocking when, in my early 20s, I
re-discovered them and found that they were actually well known films by
important directors. So I looked up more work by Starevich and his stop-motion
descendants Jan Svankmajer and The Brothers Quay.
Starevich
was my first exposure to how weird and cool stop-motion could be, and in the
early 90s Mark Romanek was all over MTV talking about how great the Quays were,
but it was seeing Svankmajer’s Little Otik at the General Cinema in
Allentown (where I worked at the time) that made me take a stronger interest in
animation in general and stop-motion in particular.
I
mostly stay away from 2D cell-animated films because more often than not I find
them fucking hideous, though there are obviously exceptions. The dreamy rotoscoping
work in American Pop and Waking Life, or the fine details of
Rankin/Bass (themselves stop-motion masters) and Don Bluth’s mid-80s children’s
films. I like almost everything from Studio Ghibli, and all of them are, if
nothing else, beautiful.
But
I’ll always check out stop-motion work, specifically anything miniature- or
puppet-based. The style seems to be a dying art, though, at least as far as
mainstream cinema is concerned, to the point where it’s considered a novelty
whenever a new one comes along. There have been a couple of mid-sized kids
movies in the past few years that have used some form or another of stop-motion
(or the cgi-enhanced appearance of stop-motion), but outside of those few, we
have Robot Chicken, Nick Park, and
Henry Selick essentially cornering the market. But the heavy-hitters of the 20th
century are still at work, creating films completely under the radar of
contemporary American audiences. Part of that, I think, is that their films
haven’t really changed in tone or visual style at all and that modern audiences
might think they look dated. The grubby, grimy and vaguely Victorian (in the
case of the Quays) or medieval look (Svankmajer) of the films seems timeless
and strangely comforting to me, but I can see where others could disagree.
In
the case of the two biggest names we’re talking about here, I think the Quays’
films have always seemed more purely cinematic, and they’ve seemed more
emotionally invested in their “characters,” giving them all specific
personalities, mostly through the use of the puppets’ body language. Svankmajer
has had more intellectual things he’s worked out onscreen and has produced a
lot of abstract, experimental work. Mostly, though, I just like the Quays more.
The
Brothers’ style has always appealed to me. Their little doll figures, tiny
puppets with books for heads, and the dirty panes of glass that seem to fill
their miniature universe, all of it just works for me. I love every frame of
theirs.
Svankmajer’s
stuff always felt heavier, bulkier somehow. He often employed life-sized
puppets and characters into his films, which always seemed a little creepier to
me than the tiny creations of Starevich and the Quays. Faust, for example, was
terrifying the first time I saw it, I think because those clay models and
religious icon puppets look just a bit more threatening than if they were
obviously miniatures. The nightmarish color schemes and harsh, crude camera
work of a good portion of his filmography always seemed so much darker than
other filmmakers working in the medium. His use of makeup effects and
especially his technique of shooting actors on sets that were just slightly
smaller than life-sized just always seemed scarier than maybe he even intended.
And while it’s clearly all done to a specific effect, and I can imagine that it
probably very closely matches the shot in his head, something about his work
was just a little too off for me. So for all these reasons (are
these all the same reason?) I never really locked into his stuff like I have
with some other directors’.
All
of this is to say that there’s a whole world out there of this painstaking work
being done by masters of their crafts, and I wish more people were talking
about them. Up to this point they’ve been known mostly in the niche art-house
circuit and have survived on DVD. Again, Little
Otik did play at the mainstream theatre I worked at in the late 90s and
early 00’s, and to this day I have no idea how that even happened other than to
guess that we probably had a really hip film-buyer back then. But that’s a rare
exception, for sure.
Recently,
though, it’s started to seem like that’s about to change, and that change has
come from a pretty unexpected place. I’m writing this the day after it was
announced that Christopher Nolan’s next film, after so much speculation about
what he would do next after the gigantic Interstellar, is in fact already
finished. Turns out he’s completed a thirty-minute documentary on the Brothers
Quay that’ll premiere at the end of this month as part of Film Forum’s showcase
of the Brothers’ work. Three of their films, In Absentia, The
Comb, and Street of Crocodiles will be shown in brand new 35mm prints and
will be released as part of a special edition blu ray that will also include
Nolan’s doc. Nolan, who’s apparently a huge fan and names the Quays as two of
his favorite filmmakers of the 20th century, is curating the
mini-festival and blu ray release through Syncopy.
This
is a huge deal! Someone like Nolan coming out and putting his name on something
like this is not only good for the Quays but also good for audiences who will
be more likely to check something out now that he’s put his stamp of approval
on it. Outside of that, though, it’s great for Nolan, for some very specific
reasons.
“The
secret impresses no one. The trick you use it for is everything.” – The
Prestige
Nolan’s
filmography has taken some hits of backlash recently. Once revered for his
so-called Kubrickian formalism and large scope storytelling (even in his
smaller films), critical response to his work seems to have darkened these past
few years and honestly, minus the last thirty minutes or so of The
Dark Knight Rises, I agree that he seems to simply plop his camera down
in the middle of the room while his actors read the script to us. It’s real
weird. At one time this was seen as a cold and clever visual style but more
recently I’ve heard it described as simply lazy. This technique wasn’t always
so obvious, as his earlier work was more intimate and life-sized. Following,
Memento,
and Insomnia
are all mystery thrillers without a whole lot of action scenes more complex
than foot chases through city streets and trailer parks and the Alaskan
wilderness.
So
it was strange to me, and I’m sure to a lot of people at the time, when it was
announced that Warner Bros. and DC Comics were handing over the reigns of the
Batman reboot to this guy. And while it was exciting to think about what the
director of Memento would do with the
Batman story, it was as random then as it was when they gave Iron
Man to Jon Favreau. They’re simply not the obvious choices for the job
(whatever you may think of Bay, I don’t think anyone was surprised when he took
on the Transformers franchise, for example). But I think Nolan’s
static shots are telling of a very specific influence that he simply hasn’t
been very forthcoming about until now. Kubrick, Mann, and Frankenheimer are all
in there, absolutely, but maybe he’s been going for something smaller all
along. Maybe dude just wants to make Gumby movies.
I’ve
always wanted these superhero franchises to have a more handmade, homemade
feel. My friends and I have talked about how the James Bond model would be a
great template for how to tell these huge, larger-than-life tales, with new
directors and stand-alone adventures taking the place of shared universes and
what inevitably becomes a sometimes shaky continuity.
Marvel
has somewhat answered this call with even more
unexpected choices in directors (the Russos, for example, who were
television directors who moved on to small goofy comedies before being called
up to the big leagues and are now primed to take the largest controlling
aesthetic hand in the MCU since Favreau himself by directing The
Winter Soldier, Civil War, and both parts of the upcoming
Infinity
War storyline). But while it’s great to see studios paying attention to
talent and rewarding the work of guys like the Russos, it’s also the case that they’re
now locked in to multi-year contracts and will be living the Marvel life for the
next five or so years (at least). Hollywood used to give directors the “one for
us, one for you” deal, wherein the filmmakers would show up to shoot a big
tentpole action movie and be rewarded by getting to make their own projects
relatively painlessly. This is still sometimes the case, as Nolan himself has
proven by breaking box office records with the Dark Knight trilogy while at the same time producing his own
personal projects, which still made a ton of money for his backers every time.
But it seems to happen less and less often.
“I
thought aspects of it seemed slightly fake.” – The Life Aquatic with Steve
Zissou
In
the 80s and 90s this was way more pronounced, with directors like David Lynch
and Tim Burton making big-budget studio deals just so they could make whatever
weird-ass thing they had in their heads at the time. Lynch was smart and had
the Blue
Velvet project written directly into his Dune contract, which came
in pretty handy when Dune absolutely fucking tanked and became legendary for how not to make a big movie (he was
so uninterested in doing these in the first place that he turned down Return
of the Jedi, which would have been a guaranteed box office hit and payday
no matter what the final product ended up looking like). Burton took on Batman
with the deal being that he could make something smaller and more personal his
next time out, which ended up being Edward Scissorhands (which is a Frankenstein
remake, just like all his films). Lynch and Burton are exceptional in that
they’ve always pretty much worn their influences on their sleeves. Both
directors worked in dark cinematic corners early in their careers before coming
to Hollywood and hitting it big. And both worked extensively in animation in
their debut films, and would come back to stop-motion and similar techniques
throughout their careers. It was a big deal when Wes Anderson produced the
full-length stop-motion Fantastic Mr. Fox, since it wasn’t a
technique that is really the go-to for mainstream Hollywood animation anymore
(he’d also incorporated Henry Selick’s creations into his Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
a few years earlier). But Anderson had shown shades of this influence
throughout his filmography, with his shots all owing at least a small debt to
the stop-motion aesthetic and “trick film” look, which I think is what people
mean when they describe his films as having a diorama feel. His frames are all
boxes holding his characters and sets in place, yes, but that look more
specifically (in some cases, very
specifically) owes itself to the absolute lunacy of the worlds of Starevich,
Svankmajer, and the Brothers Quay.
Are
all these directors trying to tell me that their biggest influence isn’t early
twentieth-century Russian puppet shit? Is that their game? Guardians of the Galaxy
had a fucking raccoon and a goddam tree in it. Those characters are a lot
closer Starevich’s Frogland than they are to The Avengers. I don’t get it.
The
way we save these big action franchises is honestly to go the Cruise/Wagner
route and simply let these directors do whatever the hell they want. The Mission
Impossible films had everybody from Brian de Palma to Brad Bird running
around trying to top each other and see who could get away with finally killing
Tom Cruise by dropping him from the highest weirdest stuff, but the reason
they’re able to do it is because the producers of these things are letting them
run their own shows. It’s telling. And what does Nolan do, one of the biggest
most successful directors on the planet, what does he do the first chance he
gets once he’s done pretending to give a shit about Batman and once he’s
finished shooting Matthew McConaughey
through freaking wormholes or whatever? Thirty-minute
documentary on the Brothers Quay. I swear to god, guys, this is what I want
from Hollywood more than anything.
And
no one saw it coming, which is incredible. He’s had this influence the whole
time and never talked about it until now.
Above: some serious Quay shit.
The
direct lineage of most directors and their influences is so convoluted that I
wouldn’t be surprised if you said anybody
was the founding father of the MCU, the biggest movie studio/annoying trend in
the world right now. My argument is going like this:
Marvel Cinematic Universe > Nolan
> Quay >
Starevich
BOOM!
Alright
well maybe it’s not airtight but it’s there. Nolan’s Batman films showed the
studios that it was okay to make “real” superhero movies, Marvel came along and
revolutionized what those movies could be and how they could be made, Nolan’s
new Quay film shows what an influence they’ve been on, if not his larger
output, at least his deeper cinematic mind, and those Quays were directly
influenced by Starevich. One two three four.
You
feel me? Let’s go deeper into this thing. The Quay influences are actually all over
Nolan’s stuff. The Scarecrow’s mask looks just like something out of Rehearsals
For Extinct Anatomies, and when the bats fly out of his face they look
exactly like the little paper birds that fly out of the filing cabinets in The
Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer. The weird jangly Victorian feel of The
Prestige (including all the Tesla stuff) looks just like Street of Crocodiles and the hospital
scene from Frida, and the final shot of The Prestige would be right at home in some of their darker work.
Leonard’s obsession with objects and his habit of displaying them in front of
himself in Memento is also a common
theme in the Quay films, where their characters are constantly just picking
shit up and putting it back down. Again, this is purely on a cinematic level,
the narrative and story-level stuff going on in these directors’ worlds
couldn’t be further apart. But it’s all there on the screen. The weird ugly
cabin where Robin Williams attacks Hilary Swank in Insomnia looks just like a Quay set with its dirty windows and
hidden trap doors and creaky old dark set decoration. Inception continues the obsession with tiny objects and impossible
set design. But the weirdest example is probably the “bookshelf dimension”
scene in Interstellar. McConaughey is
dangled in front of a surrealist landscape that is continually moving and
changing in front of him while his hands are outstretched in front of him just
like pretty much every Quay puppet ever.
Above: Nolan is a
freaking nutburger. Below: So
are the Quays.
Moral
of the story: Nolan’s a lot goofier than we thought. But let’s keep going…
“We're
still pioneers. We’ve barely begun.” – Interstellar
Nolan’s
use of the Quay imagery is relatively subtle, and based on a more internalized
use of their cinematic language. But the Quays’ love of Starevich is right out
in the open. They take directly from the ornately decorated sets and meticulous
character designs and use those influences to tell darker versions of
Starevich-style fairytales.
The
giants of stop-motion all owe their own debts to Starevich but the Quays took
it to the next level. They are probably among the few stop-motion artists that
audiences know by name, along with Art Clokey, Ray Harryhausen, Henry Selick,
and Rankin/Bass.
Above: the shot that gave me nightmares
from ages 4-12. Thanks, Ray!
These
guys worshipped Starevich. Let’s talk about why.
Dead
Bugs and Angry Gods
Starevich
got his start in filmmaking by taking on a job from the Kaunas Museum of
Natural History. He shot a few educational documentaries for the museum using
traditional live-action before trying his hand at his first creature-related
projects. He started making a film featuring live beetles, but they kept dying
during the shoots. So he did what any completely bonkers person would do: he
killed the bugs himself and replaced all their moving parts with wire so he
could just animate them and make them do what he wanted. The finished product
was The
Battle of the Stag Beetles and, allegedly, it fooled people into
thinking he had actually trained the beetles to perform for the camera.
These
films were very successful with audiences in Lithuania, especially the final
project he completed before leaving for Russia. The Beautiful Lukanida
was the first puppet-animated film and told the story of a Queen who was
secretly in love with one of her subjects. The King eventually finds out and…
actually I have no idea what happens after that. Lukanida is, unfortunately, a lost film, with no known prints
existing anywhere in the world. Maybe Nolan can put his feelers out and track
this thing down for us. The story is that Starevich himself wasn’t particularly
happy with the film, though, which may have played a part in its being kicked
to the curb of history. It was also never intended to be a “movie” and was more
of an experiment just to see what could be done with these techniques.
The
Cameraman’s Revenge is a completely
different story, though. I can’t even imagine what must have been going through
Ladi’s head when he decided to go back to hooking wires up to all these beetle
and grasshopper carcasses and make them the actors in his tiny melodramas, but
this 12 minute film is one of the most impressive things you’ll ever see,
especially for being his first real attempt at this sort of movie. Beetles in
love with dragonfly cabaret dancers, grasshoppers who ride bicycles and work as
projectionists in tiny movie theatres, and little painting studios filled with
little paintings, this movie has it all. What else, honestly, would you ask for
from a film?
Watching
this stuff, all I can think of is the immense pride Ladi must have felt at the
end of each project. Having attempted stop-motion myself to varying degrees of
success, it is absolutely exhausting--
jumping back and forth from behind the camera to the set and back again,
keeping track of all the moving pieces in your head (or a series of polaroids
and motion charts), knowing that anyone watching you won’t be able to tell that
anything’s going on at all… it’s one of those things where you know the end
result will be worth it but it seems like there’s no end in sight. But to sit
back and let the projector roll at the end of it all and have that pure
artist’s experience of doing no work
is one of the most freeing feelings, I think, a person can experience. To experience
your own creation purely as an audience member and know that, not only is your
work complete, you no longer have to “do” “anything.” The work becomes a thing
that exists on its own momentum. Anyone who’s made anything will have had this
experience to one degree or another. But how many of those people (artists,
musicians, filmmakers or otherwise) have created something to such striking
effect as the fight between the beetles in the movie theatre that concludes
this film, with one jumping through the screen and popping back out again?
It’s
also pretty bonkers that the comedy works as well as it does. The characters
have real personalities, which, again, is all Ladi. It seems almost impossible
that a bunch of dead bugs could have such distinct “looks” but, to me, Mr.
Beetle seems dopey and full of himself, Mrs. Beetle seems put-upon but happy
(until the end), and the Cameraman has an almost sardonic feel to him. And all
this is accomplished through the animation innovations of 1911. While
live-action comedies of the era were mostly concerned with slapstick or quick
gags, Starevich was almost obsessively trying to push the envelope of what
cinema could do, even while working in the genre of the “trick film”.
In
the same year in America, the great Winsor McCay was blowing everybody’s
freaking minds with his Little Nemo movie, which features
one of the most stunning shots in film history, even to this day, as his camera
slowly moves in on the animation stand and into the drawing as it comes to life
(in full color) before dominating the remaining runtime of the short. But even
a genius like McCay used the majority of his piece to set up a live-action
scenario to give the animated sequence a reason for existing within the
narrative. This is by no means meant to take away even a little bit from the
almost supernatural accomplishment of Little
Nemo. Not only is the finale a full four-minute sustained full-color
animated scene of characters fighting, tumbling over each other, getting
stretched out and flattened and all other manner of goofball business, but it
all flows so beautifully and naturally that you can forget it all came from one
man’s pen and did in fact take the “four thousand drawings” the boastful
“Winsor McCay” character claims he will draw in the first scene of the film.
Starevich never bothered with trying to qualify his weird projects, instead
just going for it and saying “here’s a bunch of insects doing a bunch of insect
shit. Enjoy.”
Starevich’s
techniques made a significant leap forward in 1913 with The Insects’ Christmas.
This time incorporating life-size locations (a living room, a Christmas tree)
with the miniature aesthetic he’d already established, this new film is already
much more ambitious in scope while being almost slight in its narrative.
After
the complex love triangles and intrigues of Cameraman’s
Revenge, this time out the director seems purely interested in style and
charm. A tiny Father Christmas climbs down out of a Christmas tree and makes a
trek out to the frozen forest to invite the ladybugs, frogs and dragonflies to
celebrate the holiday with him. The blue-tinted scenes are beautifully rendered
with intricately detailed background sets. The puppet work has the same
handmade quality as the earlier films, with the graceful at times but still
playfully jerky animation giving each shot the feeling of a beautifully
ornamented diorama box.
1922’s
Aesop adaptation Frogland (aka The Frogs Who Wanted a King) opens
with a title card that reads
“Once
upon a time the Frogland Commonwealth waxed so prosperous
that its heavy thinkers acquired the human
trait of sitting around and
making wise-croaks against the government.”
Right
off the bat this movie is out of its mind. A bunch of frogs are in session to
overhaul their government and “beseech Jupiter” to send them a king to rule
them since their current overlords are a bunch of lazy drunks. These frogs are
some ugly little things, too. Fat but lanky, with huge mouths and rolling eyes,
these are the first of Starevich’s company of feral-looking animal friends.
Jupiter,
sitting up on a cloud surrounded by his sentinels (one of them looks like the
weird robot alien thing from Communion that flies into the room
and hovers over Christopher Walken’s bed), hears their calls and sends them
their King. The frogs set out on a mission to bring him back, floating off in a
little boat made out of a shoe. Starevich’s sets are so detailed that,
especially watching this now-93-year-old footage, it’s hard to tell if he shot
some of this in his studio or actually out in the woods. Obviously, this being
stop-motion, it was all done indoors, but the attention to detail in every
frame is astounding. Every little thing in these films is accounted for, from
the little mushrooms sprouting up everywhere to the lily pads that float by as their
boat sails off. We also see the first instance of Starevich’s “bubble” effect.
The frogs blow bubbles with their mouths and spit them out at their new King to
try to get his attention. The bubbles form above the frogs’s mouths and are
carried away on the breeze, all while the rest of the scene is playing out. This is what was going on in stop-motion in
1922!!
By
the way, have I mentioned that the King is a moldy old tree with giant rolling
eyes and a sad little mouth? This movie is weird as fuck.
So
the frogs are all pissed and tell Jupiter he screwed up and sent them
“Presidential timber” instead of the great ruler they’d asked for. Jupiter,
busy reading the newspaper, has no time for their complaints and just acts
annoyed at them. So he just sends his friend the stork to go down to earth and
pose as their King. This movie!
Obviously
these frogs are happy as can be and immediately start worshipping this giant
stork. Every frog in Frogland comes out to greet the new King, and one of them
even seems to have the movie camera from The
Cameraman’s Revenge rolling to film the whole scene. But here’s the thing: THE STORK JUST STARTS EATING ALL THE FROGS. This
is some weird dark stuff, guys! The frogs start freaking the hell out and
scattering.
So
the frogs start hiding out underwater and we get a really cool shot of the
frogs standing at the bottom of the lake while actual live fish swim around
them. So Starevich was constantly figuring all this out all on his own. It
would’ve been enough if he’d simply invented this technique, but he was
constantly challenging himself to come up with new and more creative shots and
ideas. It’s like if the Lumiere brothers fourth film was Goodfellas or something.
If I had a time machine I’d do nothing but go attend all these films with their
own contemporary audiences just to see the reaction to this stuff. It must’ve
been mind-blowing to people.
The
story ends with Jupiter just giving up and firebombing all of Frogland and
basically saying “they got what they deserved.” The final frog, about to be
swallowed by the King, tells us the moral of the story: “Let well enough
alone.”
This
movie is absolutely horrifying.
The
Voice of the Nightingale from 1923
is his first film to incorporate live action footage to supplement the animated
sequences. In this case, as in The Mascot,
the story involves a little girl (Irene Starevich, the director’s daughter who
would grow up to be his closest collaborator on later films). It’s also his
first film to be hand-tinted to achieve the look of color photography. This
film is one of my absolute favorite movies in the world simply to look at. The
shots of the bird sitting and singing in front of the religious icon against
the dark and cloudy sky are just stunning. It’s shots like these, in little
short films like this one, that make me think about how lucky we are to even be
alive for all of this. Most of human history has existed outside the age of
art, let alone cinema. I really can’t get over how lucky we all are to be here
for this, in the age where we can simply take for granted that brilliant
artists have provided us, and will continue to provide for us, a steady flow of
movies to consume every day of our lives. In 2015, we have so many movies under
our belts that it’s actually impossible that a person can see them all while
also leading a “normal” life. It’s a constant game of catch-up when it comes to
trying to see everything out there, but there was a time when the art form was
brand new and the great early artists were inventing and building and laying
the foundation for future generations of filmmakers. The odds of being born
into this age of cinematic history are just astounding to me and I consider
myself, and all of us, extremely lucky and grateful to just get to see this
shot of this bird against this cloudy sky. It’s everything to me.
But
I’ll get back to that thought another time….
We
have a lot of firsts for the director in this movie: the full-color, the live
action, and my favorite of his techniques and one that would be the biggest
influence on the Quays, his motion-blur imagery. This was achieved by actually
creating an effect that is the opposite of a normal stop-motion movement.
Moving the puppet between frames creates most
normal shots/movements that we are used to in stop-motion. These
motion-blur effects are done by moving the puppets during the exposure. This
can be achieved by using a motorized puppet onscreen, but the way Starevich has
done it here, it’s hard to tell how exactly he’s getting his shots because he’s
also incorporating normal stop-motion in the backgrounds of his shots and also
because THE BIRD IS FLYING THROUGH THE FRAME in some of these shots! I can’t
stress enough how impressive this is because he had to figure all of this out
all by himself. No one else was doing work like this back then. This is 1923!
This effect was later “invented” in the late 1970s by ILM for use in The
Empire Strikes Back. 1923, guys!
Something to always
remember: George Lucas never invented anything.
He
later incorporates this effect more thoroughly in The Tale of the Fox, during
elaborate dance and chase sequences involving multiple characters moving
through constantly changing sets. But we’ll get there in a bit.
The
little girl captures the nightingale and they become pals, the little bird
telling the girl fairy tales from the Flower Kingdom, and we are treated to a
beautiful sequence of the fairies waking up in the flowers and being carried
off by butterflies, others of them just going about their morning routines (we
also get a few shots of some cool animated water). At one point a fairy gets captured by a
spider and must be rescued by another fairy riding a grasshopper. So much business in these movies. The bird tells
of how he met his mate, had some little chicks, and learned the politics of the
garden creatures (where we see the return of the grasshopper characters that
are some of Starevich’s favorite puppets, it would seem).
The
little girl, hearing the bird’s story, becomes enlightened and sets him free.
In gratitude, the nightingale gives the little girl his voice so she can sing
beautiful songs all by herself.
“And that is why the nightingale is silent during the day.
Only at night, when little children are
asleep, does he regain his beautiful voice.”
These
short fable films were very successful with audiences and began the cycle of
influence that would extend all the way into the 21st century (a new
stop-motion film from the BBC’s Aardman Animations Studios, Shaun
the Sheep, just came out this week in theaters). Starevich was
perfecting his current techniques and was about to move on to the masterpiece
level of his career with the release of The Mascot and The Tale of the Fox.
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