Web viewYuriy Norshteyn is a Russian stop motion animator. As opposed to using cel animation,...
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Yuriy Norshteyn is a Russian stop motion animator. As opposed to using cel animation, puppetry, or clay animation, Norshteyn instead created his animated works by using paper cutouts. An advantage to using cutout animation instead of traditional animation, is that you just need to create an asset once and you can reuse it whenever you need to. This allows for creating more complex designs and characters. With traditional animation you need to redraw characters and props for every frame. This causes the characters and props to look more simplistic. For example, the realistic fur textures on the hedgehog and owl in Norshteyn film “Hedgehog in the Fog”. would have taken years if traditional animators tried to replicate that. Using cutout animation also allows him to integrate real objects into his film that would look out of place in a traditionally animated film. The falling leaves from Yuriy Norshteyn segment in “Winter Days” works well, because the character is also made from material, most likely made from trees.
Transcript of Web viewYuriy Norshteyn is a Russian stop motion animator. As opposed to using cel animation,...
Yuriy Norshteyn is a Russian stop motion animator. As opposed to using cel animation,
puppetry, or clay animation, Norshteyn instead created his animated works by using paper
cutouts. An advantage to using cutout animation instead of traditional animation, is that you just
need to create an asset once and you can reuse it whenever you need to. This allows for creating
more complex designs and characters. With traditional animation you need to redraw characters
and props for every frame. This causes the characters and props to look more simplistic. For
example, the realistic fur textures on the hedgehog and owl in Norshteyn film “Hedgehog in the
Fog”. would have taken years if traditional animators tried to replicate that. Using cutout
animation also allows him to integrate real objects into his film that would look out of place in a
traditionally animated film. The falling leaves from Yuriy Norshteyn segment in “Winter Days”
works well, because the character is also made from material, most likely made from trees.
Stop motion also allows him to do things that can’t be done, or can’t be done well with
live action. “The Battle of Kerzhenets” is a film of Norshteyn that wouldn’t work as well as it
did if it were in live action. The director had a unique cinematography choice for this film. The
background characters are supposed to look flat while the king and queen are supposed to appear
three dimensional. The scene shown above juxtaposes these two. This type of style choice
wouldn’t have worked in live action, since the background characters would have the same
dimensionality as the king and queen.
An example of how one of his works couldn’t work in either live action or traditional
animation is “Seasons”. It couldn’t work in traditional animation, because Norshteyn wanted to
show a tangible world with the fabric and objects he chose to create the world. It also couldn’t
work in live action, because the placements of the structure of the towns and homes are abstract
that it would look odd in real life
