He has completed only five short films totaling up to 86 minutes during his 20-year career as animation director. Four out of the five were Oscar-nominated, including his adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, which won Best Animated Short Subject in 2000. From the ancient Russian city of Yaroslavl, Aleksandr Petrov arrived in Taipei last week to attend the Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival (台北金馬影展), which has organized a retrospective of his oeuvre to date.
Considering his reputation as an artist living in seclusion, soft-spoken and mild-mannered, the world’s top animator seemed charmingly affable at a press conference last Friday.
“It is the first time for both my son and I to come to a country located below the Black Sea,” said the gray-bearded Aleksandr Petrov, smiling at his son Dmitri, who has worked with him since the age of 16.
Respected as the most accomplished practitioner of paint on glass, a painstaking technique almost always undertaken by individual artists rather than production studios, Petrov’s style consists of using his fingertips to paint with slow drying oil paint on layers of backlit glass. After photographing a finished frame/painting, the artist modifies the painting for the next frame. The process was repeated some 29,000 times over the course of two years to complete the 20-minute The Old Man and The Sea. It took three years for the 26-minute My Love (2006), the artist’s most recent work adapted from a novel by Russian writer Ivan Shmelyov.
The most difficult aspect of the meticulous method lies in the fact that unlike your average animated movie, which can be processed separately and pieced together later, the exacting technique demands a veracity born out of immediacy and a well-coordinated and precise performance from the artist. To Petrov, it’s a special trait that attracts rather than repels.
“It creates a distinctive aesthetic since what is shown is what the artist originally conceives and envisions. There is no modification or translation in between,” the 51-year-old artist said.
As images are manipulated directly under the camera and recorded frame by frame, each of them appears to emerge from the previous one and melt into the next. Such technique gives birth to a sense of fluid and organic movement, and visual effects that seamlessly fit to the artist’s world of dreams, sub-consciousness, reverie and deliriums under a photo-realistic crust.
Petrov’s art is often said to exist in a moment suspended between the real and the surreal. In The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1992), inspired by the work of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the swirl of dark strokes and brushes renders Dostoyevsky-esque ravings into images, delivering a haunting psychological depth. A story about a 16-year-old student torn between a chambermaid and a mysterious femme fatale at the turn of the century, My Love uses vibrant colors and impressionistic flows to depict the boy’s subconscious images and inner emotions.
Indeed, terms used to describe Petrov’s films range from “romantic realism” to “impressionist painting come-to-life.” Yet to the animator, his art is first of all a reflection of life.
“I am a realist. My works show the state of things … The fluidity unique to the medium is closely related to my worldview that life is changeable and erratic,” he said.
As for his affinity to the tradition of Russian literature (four out of the five works are based on Russian texts, including The Cow (1989), which was adapted from a short story by Andrei Platonov and which propelled Petrov onto the international stage), the humble artist said it is merely a natural procedure to express one’s reflections after reading a novel or story.
“I don’t know how to express my thoughts with pens so I paint. To me, the most important thing is to reach a balance between the author and myself. In order to respect the original work, I have to restrain myself from getting too personal. And that includes the choice of style and the mood created,” Petrov said.
Working as a lone artist for his earlier works, Petrov became a project leader when he teamed up with a Canadian production company for The Old Man and The Sea, the first large-format animated film shot in the IMAX format. Ten artists, animators and designers were recruited to complete My Love, about 20 percent of which was painted over video scenes in a process similar to rotoscope in order to reach a higher level of accuracy in terms of character movements and facial expressions.
Trained as a painter in the beginning of his artistic upbringing, Petrov admitted that the transition from painter to animation director was painful and jokingly called it a “mistake.”
“The most ideal way for me is to do everything all by myself. It’s much easier because I don’t need to communicate with others or make concessions,” he said.
As a lone artist or a team leader, Petrov has found and mastered an artistic expression he said is natural and integral, whereby in a painting (i.e. paint-on-glass), all elements are parts of a integral, organic whole. “It just matches my personality — simple, real and nothing fancy,” he said.
The last screening of Petrov’s works at the Golden Horse is on Saturday at Vieshow Cinemas Durban (德安威秀影城) in Taichung City.
Taiwan’s overtaking of South Korea in GDP per capita is not a temporary anomaly, but the result of deeper structural problems in the South Korean economy says Chang Young-chul, the former CEO of Korea Asset Management Corp. Chang says that while it reflects Taiwan’s own gains, it also highlights weakening growth momentum in South Korea. As design and foundry capabilities become more important in the AI era, Seoul risks losing competitiveness if it relies too heavily on memory chips. IMF forecasts showing Taiwan widening its lead over South Korea have fueled debate in Seoul over memory chip dependence, industrial policy and
“China wants to unify with Taiwan at the lowest possible cost, and it currently believes that unification will become easier and less costly as time passes,” wrote Amanda Hsiao (蕭嫣然) and Bonnie Glaser in Foreign Affairs (“Why China Waits”) this month, describing how the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is playing the long game in its quest to seize Taiwan. This has been a favorite claim of many writers over the years, easy to argue because it is so trite. Very obviously, if the PRC isn’t attacking Taiwan, it is waiting. But for what? Hsiao and Glaser’s main point is trivial,
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It took 12 years and months of standing in the same mountain location for director Liang Chieh-te (梁皆得) to capture a few seconds of footage: Taiwan’s largest resident raptor locking talons with its mate and spinning through the air in a courtship ritual. With only about 1,000 left in the wild and very short flight windows, the mountain hawk-eagle remains among Taiwan’s most elusive birds. The species generally produces only one offspring per year. Using forest cameras, the film crew and research teams document the arduous process the monogamous pairs go through for the chick to hatch and grow up, weathering
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