By Larisa Naumenko
Staff Writer
For MT
A still from "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King," which cost $10 million to make and is expected to be released in October.
Think of it as "The Nutcracker," a la Disney. Except it's not Disney at all -- it's homegrown.
Russian animators at Argus International, a studio in Moscow, will offer up a $10 million feature-length cartoon version of the famous children's story in October, and they're hoping it will be a blockbuster.
"The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" is scheduled for simultaneous release in four languages in movie theaters from Perm to Potsdam to Paris to Portland, in a bid to tap into the lucrative market for family-friendly fare.
Germany's MC One, the film's producer, plans to market Russian, German, French and English versions of the movie, along with a soundtrack album packed with recordings by pop stars.
The hefty price tag of the animated film is unprecedented for Russia. As a big-budget, feature-length cartoon rather than shorter pieces meant for television, it's also a rare breed.
Following the chart-topping success of songs written by the likes of Elton John and Celine Dion to accompany Disney films, Argus said it was in talks with a range of artists, from Enrique Iglesias, Eminem, girl band Tatu and Alanis Morisette, to commission original songs.
Any of those would lend funky anachronism to a story set in grandiose 1903 St. Petersburg.
There, a magic nut turns a spoiled young prince into a wooden doll who is pursued by the palace mice into the enchanted forest of Crackatuck. With the help of the grandfatherly Drosselmeier, a magic bird and a young girl named Masha, all ends well.
The seed for the film's story grew out of a screenplay that director Tatyana Ilyina submitted as part of her 1987 thesis work at Moscow's State Cinema Institute.
The project languished for most of the next decade.
Then, three years ago at a festival in France, the project found its own sort of fairy godmother, in the form of MC One. The Stuttgart-based company agreed then to bankroll the transformation of the three-minute clip into a 78-minute feature.
Legions of animators at Argus went to work. Its deputy general director, Sergei Karinsky, said work on the film would be finished in a few months, after the dialogue recordings are complete.
"The team at Argus did a wonderful job -- it's a film of great quality," said Pino van Lamsweerde, who directed the 1986 animated film "Asterix Among the Bretons" and has seen an early version of "The Nutcracker."
"The animation is very fluid and the rhythm is excellent," he said. "It has a special charm that should captivate audiences."
Van Lemsweerde praised Argus designers' use of color and contrast, saying it gave the film a different look from other cartoons. "Their creative team has definitely put their signature in it, while at the same time managing to keep the international look."
Argus was founded in 1991 inside the Professional Lyceum of Animated Cinematography, the country's only training academy for animators. General director Vladimir Repin now supervises a staff of 200.
MC One chief executive Sven Ebeling thinks he has found in Argus a rising star in the family-friendly entertainment industry -- and a future commercial heavyweight. Argus' work "is going to become a real addition to the international market," Ebeling said. "Their old and deep animation tradition as well as the spirit they can create within a movie is needed."
Russian-made animation has found recognition in the West before. In 2000, Alexander Petrov won an Oscar for best animated short film for his adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea," painstakingly rendered on thousands of glass panes.
Others have also made similarly successful careers abroad. Russian-born Gennady Tartakovsky has won recognition for his work on programs shown on the Cartoon Network, including "Dexter's Laboratory" and "Power Puff Girls."
Though rarely in the Western spotlight, Russian animators have been highly regarded since cartoons came about as an art form at the turn of the 20th century. Russia produced its first cartoons in 1911. By the mid-1920s, animation studios were housed within big Soviet film studios.
Animators say small operating budgets have made it hard for their work to make it onto the industry's radar screen.
"We don't have a tradition of animation as a commercial industry," Repin said. In Russia, he said, underwriters for large-scale animation projects are entirely absent.
"Animation for a long time was treated as art for children only," Ilyina said. "The entire world knows it's a gold mine, and Russia is starting to slowly get used to the idea."
In the West, animated films consistently rake in fortunes, thanks to strong marketing, an established audience core and sales of omnipresent licensed merchandise like stuffed animals and key chains.
Walt Disney's 1994 film "The Lion King," made some $313 million at the box office and is one of the top 10 grossing films in U.S. film history. Films from other industry heavyweights, like DreamWorks' "Shrek" and Pixar's "Toy Story," have approached that level of profits.
Animated films in Russia don't yet have such a dedicated following. Together with weak demand, poor distribution strategies have cut into their earning potential.
"The lack of multiscreen movie theaters in Russia doesn't make it possible for an animated film to collect a giant box office draw," said Alexei Ryazantsev, general director at film distributor Caro Premier.
"Film distributors usually do not show animated movies in the evening, which is the best time, box office wise," Argus' Karinsky said.
An animated feature to be released this spring will serve as a litmus test for the size of the market "The Nutcracker" can hope to tap. "Dwarf Nose," the story of a boy turned into a dwarf, was produced by Melnitsa, another domestic animation studio, and is set for distribution by Russian firm CTB in late March.
To ensure "The Nutcracker" lives up to expectations, the movie's creators catered to foreign audience sensibilities, going to great lengths to "whiten" one of the film's characters, a black servant boy who waits on the spoiled, young nutcracker prince.
"Potential U.S. distributors said such a character would get negative feedback in the United States," Karinsky said. "It was a nod to American political correctness." |
