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.
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