Comments on: It's Been a Long Time Since Nu Pogodi

It's Been a Long Time Since Nu Pogodi

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:37:45 -0800

Russian animators are making the most out of Flash, with some pretty amazing results.

The animations featured in the article are: Chevengur, a darkly dystopian piece. Yellow, inspired by surrealist Daniil Kharms. Happy New Year, which is anything but. A Little Girl - the day in the life of an addict. Nude, a piece set to the tune of the Radiohead song of the same name. Grey, and dark humor in the varying shades thereof. And last but not least, the two-part epic Animus - Part 1 - Part 2.

By: dunkadunc

dunkadunc — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:44:44 -0800

That first one couldn't have been animated in Flash. Could it? Yellow is weird-- almost Salad Fingers weird.

By: le morte de bea arthur

le morte de bea arthur — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:49:41 -0800

While there are some excellent examples of animation there, I'm not sure why they're being describes as 'Flash' animation. The first one, Chevengur, looks to have been rendered in a 3D package. The fact that it's playing in the Flash player means very little; by the same logic every video on YouTube is Flash. The author of the article doesn't seem to have a clue about what Flash is or how it works.

Many people accuse Flash creators of simply pressing buttons on a keyboard and up pops the finished product.

Many people also accuse blog writers of the same thing...

By: le morte de bea arthur

le morte de bea arthur — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 04:50:15 -0800

Post-preview: Damn you, blockquote!

By: Netzapper

Netzapper — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:02:44 -0800

The first one is the only one I watched... and I was absolutely fucking astounded that somebody had managed to pull off that level of 3D animation in Flash. I was composing a post about how I have an inferiority complex with regards to the Russians. That their experts invariably seem to be more expert than ours, something about how they spend all their time doing their craft while ours are spending at least a little time participating in Consumer Culture or something like that. That since the only Russian vices are vodka and tobacco, which go just fine with most creative and scientific work, that they're culturally predisposed to produce masters. Or something like that. But, yeah, idiot blogger incorrectly claiming it's Flash seems more plausible.

By: Hovercraft Eel

Hovercraft Eel — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:08:59 -0800

In soviet union, animators flash you.

By: Marisa Stole the Precious Thing

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:10:02 -0800

I have to admit I don't know nearly enough about animation to be able to tell if something is made in Flash or not - I just kinda took the author's word for it. Maybe by "Flash animation" he meant "animation sequences that you can watch on a Flash player".

By: GratefulDean

GratefulDean — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:18:16 -0800

=dark

By: archagon

archagon — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:40:53 -0800

Not quite Flash, but one of my favorite Russian animators of recent times: Ivan Maximov. Wind Along the Coast Slow Bistro 5/4

By: archagon

archagon — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:42:12 -0800

Interesting - he's been mentioned here before.

By: nasreddin

nasreddin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 05:53:39 -0800

Sure enough, a gleeful sense of the macabre is never far away. One old Russian joke went, 'In America you can always find a party but in Russia the party will always find you.' ATTRIBUTION FAIL

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:12:55 -0800

Chevengur is a novel by Andrei Platonov from the 1920s, in case anyone wants background. Thanks for the post!

By: Lipstick Thespian

Lipstick Thespian — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:48:23 -0800

Can anyone tell me what the music was for Chevengur? I loved that.

By: cavalier

cavalier — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:03:17 -0800

Me too - I'm having a really hard time believing these were originated in Flash. If they were, that's painstakingly difficult and amazing, but maybe the author meant they are being conveyed? Ok; on preview, the latter two looked rather vectory and could have been.

By: ook

ook — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:40:56 -0800

Lipstick Thespian: it's by Arvo Part; I'm blanking out on the name of the piece though.

By: ook

ook — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 07:53:20 -0800

Oh, wait -- I'm pretty sure it's Tabula Rasa, now that I think of it.

By: Greg Nog

Greg Nog — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 08:08:32 -0800

One old Russian joke went, 'In America you can always find a party but in Russia the party will always find you.' ... ATTRIBUTION FAIL I gotta say, though, I love that Yakov Smirnoff jokes have risen to the level of old-timey aphorism. Man! The things people will accept as hallowed received wisdom in the future! I shudder with revulsed anticipation!

By: odinsdream

odinsdream — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:12:43 -0800

...what will the Russians do with HTML next!?

By: regicide is good for you

regicide is good for you — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:44:45 -0800

In soviet union, animators flash you. Flagged for please just let this die so we can get on with our lives.

By: gorgor_balabala

gorgor_balabala — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 11:58:11 -0800

So this Russian animation, it Flashes?

By: batmonkey

batmonkey — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 12:03:04 -0800

During the download phase, one of the videos (A Little Girl) caused my bot alarm to go crazy, so anyone tempted to click those without protection is duly warned.

By: rainy

rainy — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:04:02 -0800

Daniil Charms is awesome, imagine a much darker version of Lewis Carroll on acid, dying in a psychiatric hospital in a frozen Leningrad in early forties during the siege. This cartoon isn't really based on any of his stuff and isn't very good. And he spelled his own pen-name as 'Charms', not Kharms. And I've read he died in a psychiatric ward not in just any hospital. And also he was apprehended on suspicion of being a spy because he wore really weird clothes, not clothes of an English dandy.

By: nasreddin

nasreddin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:08:57 -0800

And he spelled his own pen-name as 'Charms', not Kharms. Huh?

By: nasreddin

nasreddin — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:13:27 -0800

And I've read he died in a psychiatric ward not in just any hospital More specifically, he died in the psychiatric ward at Kresty, one of Leningrad's central prisons for counterrevolutionaries. He wasn't in for espionage, he was in for "defeatism."

By: rainy

rainy — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:16:25 -0800

Animus is really great, she ought to make a full length cartoon in that drawing style. It's just neat as hell. Little Girl is good too, but that song is not 'Krematoriy'. Maybe the song is by the same band, I'm not sure.

By: Marisa Stole the Precious Thing

Marisa Stole the Precious Thing — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:18:04 -0800

I just now realized you can sing the post title to the tune of the first line of Led Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll". I might have to put that album on now.

By: rainy

rainy — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:18:45 -0800

@nasreddin: Charms wrote in english sometimes and he spelled his name 'Charms'. I think I saw that in one of scans of his working notebooks. It may have been a french spelling, though, but I think Kharms doesn't sound right.. Harms may be better.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:45:24 -0800

Wikipedia:

Daniil invented the pseudonym Kharms while attending high school at the prestigious German "Peterschule", probably influenced by his fascination with Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. While at the Peterschule, he learned the rudiments of both English and German, and it may have been the English "harm" and "charm" that he incorporated into "Kharms". Throughout his career Kharms used variations on his name and the pseudonyms DanDan, Khorms, Charms, Shardam, and Kharms-Shardam, among others.

No reference given, but it sounds plausible.

By: languagehat

languagehat — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 16:51:51 -0800

From Russian Wikipedia: Псевдонимов у Ювачева было много, и он играючи менял их: Ххармс, Хаармсъ, Дандан, Чармс, Карл Иванович Шустерлинг и др. Однако именно псевдоним «Хармс» с его амбивалентностью (от французского «charme» — «шарм, обаяние» и от английского «harm» — «вред») наиболее точно отражал сущность отношения писателя к жизни и творчеству. [Yuvachev had a lot of pseudonyms, and he playfully exchanged them: Khkharms, Khaarmsъ, Dandan, Charms, Karl Ivanovich Schusterling, etc. But the pseudonym "Kharms" in particular, with its ambivalence (from French charme 'charm' and English harm) was the most exact reflection of the substance of the writer's relationship to life and creativity.]

By: rainy

rainy — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:01:51 -0800

@languagehat: that's interesting, and I knew that he tried different variations of that name, but I'm wondering whether he ever used 'Kharms' when writing it in latin letters. I bet the english part of Wikipedia was simply translated from Russian. Now it occurs to me that he would not want to use "Charms" in English because it loses all ambivalence, Kharms just sounds completely wrong, and Harms also loses ambivalence but my guess would be that's how he'd want it in English. By the way, I grew up with his children's books and when I got to his other work in high school, it caused quite a bit of cognitive dissonance both because that's what it does and because I thought of him as just an odd children's writer.

By: twins named Lugubrious and Salubrious

twins named Lugubrious and Salubrious — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 01:00:18 -0800

Thank you for this.