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Studio Melnitsa's Bogatyr Cycle: Notes on a Global Approach to Contemporary Studio Animation

2021; Volume: 61; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cj.2021.0077

2578-4919

Mihaela Mihailova,

Asian Culture and Media Studies

Studio Melnitsa's Bogatyr Cycle:Notes on a Global Approach to Contemporary Studio Animation Mihaela Mihailova (bio) With the exception of anime scholarship, studies of contemporary commercial animation remain predominantly focused on Hollywood studios implicitly positioning their output as the dominant and indeed paradigmatic mode of animated cultural production.1 This article aims to move beyond Anglophone animation studies' often uncritical embrace of an enduring Western canon by advocating for and modeling close analysis of commercial featurelength animation in comparatively understudied national contexts. Specifically, the following pages present a brief examination of twenty-first-century Russian studio animation, which offers an illuminating case study of the ways in which the medium can function as a space for negotiating the parameters of a nation's social, political, and artistic landscape. Mixing Hollywood animation tropes with recognizably nation-specific narratives, historical references, and visual influences has become a leading trend in Russian animation in the twenty-first century. This is especially true [End Page 166] of Melnitsa Animation Studio's bogatyr (Russian epic hero)2 cycle, a series of animated features loosely based on Russian heroic epics that begins with Alesha Popovich i Tugarin Zmey (Alesha Popovich and Tugarin the serpent, Konstantin Bronzit, 2004). In their bogatyr films, Melnitsa's signature aesthetic is defined by traditional two-dimensional animation shaped by the visual language of caricature. While the Alesha Popovich of oral tradition is described as sly and crafty, Melnitsa transforms him into a bumbling jock, overemphasizing his physical prowess and exploiting his dim-wittedness for comedic effect. His juvenile haircut, combined with his large ears and small nose, contrasts with his barrel-like chest and impossibly thick arms, creating the overall impression of a baby-faced bodybuilder. While a priori amusing, such a representation of the epic hero—which set the tone for the portrayal of bogatyrs in subsequent franchise installments—registers as transgressively, irreverently humorous to Russian audiences accustomed to somber, majestic visual depictions of the folk hero, as exemplified by Viktor Vasnetsov's emblematic 1898 oil painting Bogatyrs, featuring Dobrynya Nikitich, Alesha Popovich, and Ilya Muromets (all three of whom appear as protagonists in Melnitsa's animated cycle). Alesha Popovich i Tugarin Zmey parodies the visual gravitas and pathos characteristic of such traditional bogatyr iconography by exaggerating some of its elements (such as the hero's strength) and distorting others (such as his noble steed, which becomes an irritating talking animal). Additionally, as Anzhelika Artiukh has observed, this animation style mocks the ceremonial, government-sanctioned nationalistic fervor of Soviet cinema's heroic live-action epics, which goes as far back as Sergei Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky (1938).3 Alesha Popovich i Tugarin Zmey's embrace of flatness and caricature earned positive reviews, most of which framed it as a welcome resistance to the hegemony of three-dimensional digital animation.4 Yet despite the bogatyr cycle's efforts to emphasize its home-grown flavor, both within its historically epic diegesis and through its aesthetic links to the historical lineage of Russian drawn animation, its brand of comedy is strongly influenced by American sources. In particular, the films borrow from Shrek (Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, 2001) in parodying folklore both visually and verbally. When the familiar Hollywood tropes are applied to a quintessentially native narrative about a folk hero, the resulting humor owes much more to DreamWorks than it does to Russia's legendary Soyuzmul'tfil'm studio. For example, critics have noted more than a passing resemblance between Shrek's cheeky sidekick Donkey and Alesha Popovich's wise-cracking horse Yulii, whose incessant running commentary and exasperating demeanor likewise recall his American predecessor.5 On a more fundamental level, the Russian series uses the self-referential parody [End Page 167] mechanisms that were reintroduced into mainstream animation thanks to Shrek's success to both verbally mock and visually deconstruct folkloric and cinematic clichés. To complicate their intertextual and political framework further, the bogatyr films owe their approach to physical reality and movement to a different facet of US animation; their visual humor relies on the rules of "cartoon physics" defined during the Golden Age of Hollywood animation.6 For example, in an early scene from Alesha Popovich i...