Far-out Estonian animation from 1974

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/29/far-out-estonian-animation-fro.html

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Feels like there is some rotoscoping going on here.

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Yup. I was thinking ‘Worker and parasite’ meets the Arrow.

why did the cat freak out and everything go backwards with the color purple?
is this some unspoken Baltic cultural norm?

Moral of the story: Don’t mess around with cats.

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I don’t remember seeing the cartoon, but had seen or owned the book. The art in the cartoon is by two artists: Leonhard Lapin and Sirje Runge.

“Värvilind” directly translates to color bird.

Another cool cartoon by Raamat is based on art by Jüri Arrak.

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Okay. First there were people just listlessly playing boring games and then a red revolution happens, that makes sense. They get to have a car now! And then an orange revolution, which was oddly prescient for 1974. And then a… blue revolution? And a dark green revolution, and finally an ugly purple revolution, at which point the psyche of the proletariat, as represented by the increasingly hostile cat, begins to snap. Overwhelmed by the color singularity, they reject the car and other trappings of modernity. After the final anprim revolution they return to the melted, colorful ruins of the city and lose themselves in the ancient games once again. Pretty clear!

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Better quality version of the same film.

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Someone drank the tweening and color mixing budgets (okay, it predates tweening budget,) then worked very hard to fix it and to presage Apple II+ screen transition libraries…whoever wrote for Beagle Bros… and how Satori (the screensaver) would just hang 10 years into release.
Also nobody knew how to actually mic. a clarinet until six minutes (and 30 years) ago.

Still working on the carbon-negative DNN/DeepDream-y workup renderers, very sorry to report. Thanks for those animated extras, wow!

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Definitely! Thing’s been around since before WW1.

My two favorite vintage Croatian (previously Yugoslavian) Zagreb Studio cartoons: The first (unfortunately, an unrestored version) is about a little girl – a budding aerospace engineer – and how she handles a bullying punk (1959). The graphics of the restored version (on DVD) are excellent. The second cartoon (1968) is about the intense loyalty and friendship between a man (forced into military service) and his frog; the scenes of celebration are hilarious.


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I have no reason to suspect the folks Daedelus worked with were aware of the Estonial animation, but the subject matter made me really think of the video for Fair Weather Friends:

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I’m rendering with help of DNN right now :slight_smile:
https://openimagedenoise.github.io

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Estonia is a country I could not point to on a map or even name one famous person who came from there…
…until November that is…

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You’re welcome! You may also wish to check out “Masters of Russian Animation”. In particular there’s one film therein titled Hedgehog in the Fog (dir. Yuriy Norshteyn, 1975). The animation technique is very unusual, and the story is eerie, complex, and hypnotic. It’s on youtube; that’s where I first saw it then had to get the DVD for the other animation.

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This looks very intriguing.

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A truly groovy - and slightly trippy -thing. And now I have a lot more things to watch, from all the comments above. :wink:

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It is such a weird and wonderful movie. I bought it on blu-ray but I think it’s on Netflix (in the UK anyway.)

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