The Magic of Animation

It’s going to be the Russian animation’s 100th anniversary in 2012. The first Russian puppet animation was created in 1912 by Vladislav Starevich. It was called «Beautiful Lukanida or the war between stags and barbels», and that was the first time the stop-motion technique was applied.

The popularity of animated cartoons grew each year, and in 1936 the «Soyuzmultfilm» studio was founded, and it started producing color cartoons in 1937. Such animation experts as Vyacheslav Kotenochkin, Fedor Khitruk, Andrey Khorzhanovsky and Yuri Norshtein worked at «Soyuzmultfilm». Alexander Petrov’s cartoon «The old man and the sea» was awarded with an Academy Award in 1999 and became the first feature-length animation for the IMAX cinemas. The cartoon called «Hedgehog in the fog» was recognized as the greatest animation of all time in 2003 (according to the results of the survey made among 140 film critics of the world).

In anticipation of the New Year holidays, MAMM presents an exhibition of works by one of the most famous Russian animation artists Sergey Alimov and his students. It was Alimov who created the famous cartoons «Boniface’s holiday», «Toptyzhka» and «The story of a crime» at the «Soyuzmultfilm» studio in the 1960s. These films, which are familiar to several generations of Russian viewers since childhood, won many prestigious awards, including «The Bronze Lion» from the Venice Film Festival and awards from Oberhausen and San Francisco.

The exhibition demonstrates sketches for different cartoons, the cartoons themselves and Sergey Alimov’s book illustrations. Having addressed the book illustrations in the 1970s he designed a lot of books for children and adults — the series for N. Gogol’s «Dead Souls», E.T.A. Hoffmann’s «The Little Zaches», books by M. Saltykov-Shchedrin, M. Bulgakov, A. Pushkin and many others.

More than 50 works by Sergey Alimov’s students from his workroom in VGIK film institute are included in the exposition. Sergey Alimov currently serves as the main artist of the Moscow central puppet theater named after S.V. Obraztsov. Sergey Alimov stages plays for children and adults («The Night before Christmas», «Queen of Spades», «Gulliver’s Travels» etc.).