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.
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