The Man Who Loved Cartoons The play of the future Nobel laureate of the Belgian Maurice Meterlinck “Blue Bird” has become a real legend in the history of the Russian theater. First staged on the stage in 1908 by the legendary Stanislavsky, it has not left the stage of the Moscow Art Theater for more than a century, which is a kind of world record. It is difficult to say why the gloomy children's fairy tale with adult arguments about life, death and human vices so attracted the Russian-speaking public, because neither in the homeland of the playwright-symbolist, nor in France, where he spent his mature life, such hype has never been observed. There is information that the wife of Meterlinka, who saw the production with her own eyes, and the writer himself remained completely delighted with the interpretation of the work by Stanislavsky. The film world has also repeatedly turned for inspiration to The Blue Bird, and it is not surprising and perhaps even logical that the most unusual of the screen adaptations of Meterlink’s text was born from the ideas of the actor in the third generation and the son of the legendary Moscow Art Art Artist Boris Livanov.
Vasily Livanov is known to the general public primarily as a film actor, but his contribution to Soviet animation is also very significant. Vasily Borisovich gave his voice to dozens of animated characters (including the crocodile Gena, Uncle Au and Carlson), wrote more than ten scripts (for example, for the cycle “Bremen Musicians”) and directed four animation works, including the full-length “Blue Bird”. To consider the film adaptation in the usual sense of the word this cartoon is quite difficult. The gloomy world of Meterlinck’s fairy tale was based on frequent change of locations, images, a lot of dialogues, a minimum of action and a maximum of contemplation, while Livanov’s world is almost silent, and the visual range of the picture only fragmentary correlates with the literary original and multiple Moscow Art Theater productions, with which the director was certainly familiar.
The action, unlike the play, takes place not in timelessness, but in an unnamed metropolis of the second half of the twentieth century, in which there is a lot of human movement, concrete structures and smart mechanisms, but little nature, sympathy and love. The architecture of the city, with its broken and curved lines, is reminiscent of the classic films of German expressionism “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” by Wien and “Metropolis” by Lang. The beginning and ending of the tape are made in a rare photo collage technique, when the elements cut from paper and photographs are combined in the frame, and the main part of the cartoon is created by the tools of traditional hand-drawn animation.
Livanov’s contemporary reading of Meterlink is reinforced by an anti-militarist message. The idea, which the playwright was marked only dotted, the author of the cartoon brings to the fore. The rich man, who sponsors military conflicts (the thesis “war is business” for Soviet cinema is quite unexpected), proudly says that this century has already given him two great successes (meaning both world wars), and by the third there was nothing left. In the late 1960s, when the cartoon was being created, the atomic Third World War was far from a subject of fiction, but a real threat, so the director, depicting the moloch of war, uses shots of children who became his victims.
Opposing animation to war, the director returns to his childhood, in which he learned the horrors of war and realized the enormous power of animation. It was during the Second World War that the boy Vasya Livanov, who already knew what it was like to be under bombardment, saw the classic Disney film Bambi, after which he irrevocably fell in love with drawn pictures and began to believe in a fairy tale. For him, animation has forever become a fantastic tool with which you can pave a path to the future, expressing your attitude to other people and the world around you. And it is not in vain that from the last shots of “Blue Bird” the viewer is looking at happy children’s faces, which will give smiles if not the state, then a cheerful uncle, hoarsely speaking in the voices of his favorite characters.