Film Forum

Two wonderful Russian animations invoke the pathos of Dostoyevsky and the off-kilter humor of Chekhov. REZO is a whimsical cartoon based on the life and art of Rezo Gabriadze (the filmmaker’s father), who grew up during the Second World War (his “oasis” was “library #6”) to become a screenwriter, film director, and founder of a beloved puppet theater. With nuance and wit, REZO suggests that the life of an artist provides refuge from a world of brute force and stupidity. Coupled with Yuri Norstein’s legendary TALE OF TALES, a movie justly celebrated as one of the greatest animated films of all time. An adorable wolf, a minotaur, a cat, and a fish populate a small boy’s world in which soldiers leave for war, never to return, and a baby suckles at his mother’s breast. Snow falls on apple trees as 20 million Russians disappear…

Presented with support from the Helen Frankenthaler Endowed Fund for Films on Art and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Fund

Reviews

On the puppetry of Rezo Gabriadze:

“This is art puppetry at the highest level.”
– The New Yorker

On REZO:

“Charmingly personal... teems with eccentric details.”
– Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times

“REZO is probably the closest thing to what Chagall might have done as an animator filmmaker, had he had the opportunity and inclination. This is also an absolutely charming film. REZO is a wonderfully sly and bittersweet oral history from a great Georgian artist. It also proves how animation can be the perfect vehicle for serious filmmaking. Frankly, this is probably the only way to do Gabriadze’s story justice.”
– Joe Bendel, Unseen Films

On TALE OF TALES:

“Haunting.”
– Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times

“Made by Yuri Norstein, the doyen of Russian animators… here is your chance to fall under Norstein’s spell. If you can’t quite account for your rapture, you’re not alone… TALE OF TALES is never sweet, let alone cute; we are as far from Bambi and Thumper as it’s possible to go, in the animated world. Yet there’s something blessed and consoling in these unfathomable sights… Like Tarkovsky’s THE MIRROR, from four years earlier, it is a map of memories… voted the greatest animated film ever made - a rightful accolade.”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

“TALE OF TALES is a mysterious animated film, tough and delicate, that has won prizes at interntional film festivals since it first appeared in 1980, culminating in prizes in both Los Angeles and Zagreb (in 2002) as the best animated film of all time. It was made in Soviet Russia by Yuri Norstein, who was not allowed to travel to receive any of his awards, and who was almost prevented from making, and then from showing, the film at all. It is a film that immediately changes the memory — mine at least — of all other films. It is immediately apprehensible, and needs to be seen again and again, because it remains puzzling, both as to its form and as to its meaning… I think the film works so deeply because it combines perfectly the way we define childhood memories every time we call them up, and the sense we have of the archetypes of myth — apple, forest, snow, wind, light, fire, water, dark — as part of those memories.”
– AS Bryatt, The Guardian