Wanderers

"The rains of the long journey have torn my hat, and my coat has crumbled in the daily storms... I suddenly remember the master of the wild verse, Chikusai, wandering in the old days on these paths," wrote Matsuo Bashō before he opened Winter Days, a famous renku (linked verse), with the following hokku:

In the withering gusts
a wanderer -
how much like Chikusai I have become!

In order to make a renku, Japanese poets sat in a circle, and the verses traveled from one poet to the next. The first poet, the master of verse – Bashō in this case - wrote the first three verses (the hokku), then the next poet borrowed the previous poet’s ending verse and added his two verses to construct a new poem, and so it went all the way to the last poet in the circle.
Winter Days was made in the 17th century by a circle of 36 poets.
In 2003, Kihachirō Kawamoto gave life to Winter Days as a linked animation by inviting 36 animators to each create a 30-seconds long animation of verses written by each of the 36 poets. Yuri Norstein, the master of wild animation, was invited to create an animation of Bashō's hokku. Norstein created this minute long animation in which the two wanderers - Bashō, the poet and Chikusai, the character of lore – meet.

Heron and Crane

Heron and Crane, a short animation by Yuri Norstein (1974). A personal favourite.

The Tale of Tales (Сказка сказок)

Yuri Norstein made this 27-minute stop-motion animation film in 1979. Consistently selected as "the best animated film of all time", the film remains surprisingly obscure. Norstein wanted to make a movie about his childhood memories of World War II in Russia. He remembered little more than a feeling: a smell of frost and snow, and a haunting melody of a tango (The Weary Sun, see my previous post), which in the 1940s was being played all the time in Russia.
Rather than just reconstructing this feeling in a film, Norstein structured the film itself as a fleeting collective memory of those who, like him, were little children in the 1940s. This is why creatures from Russian poetry, folk stories and even lullabies (such as сeренький волчoк, the little grey wolf) are no less real than mothers, soldiers and dancers. Go to sleep, batyushka, or the little grey wolf will carry you away into the woods...
Note how the wolf for a brief moment hums the tango, not the lullaby (at 7:25). Сказка сказок is all poetry, music and psychology. As a result, the film leaves you with a fleeting feeling - almost a memory; as if you yourself, in Norstein’s words, stood on the floor of a departed sea.