I have to admit that after my first viewing of 'Tale of Tales', my impulse was to go through my other reviews and take off half a star from every other film. It made everything else I could think of look superficial and unimaginative. It made most recent western features and anime look like soulless eye-candy. I can't politely say what it made 'Sinbad, Legend of the Seven Seas' look like.

After a second viewing and a little time to settle down, I think I can restrain myself to saying that 'Tale of Tales' is a unique masterpiece that stands in a class of its own.

Originally titled 'There Will Come a Little Grey Wolf', this 30 minute film was made in the late 1970's in the U.S.S.R, without state of the art technology, and with paranoid Soviet censors scrutinising every frame for anti-state messages (it was delayed, rejected, and even had its original title refused.) It's difficult to understand how such a work of art could be produced under such conditions.

The little grey wolf of the original title refers to a Russian lullaby, which cajoles the baby to sleep, or the little grey wolf will come and take him away to the deep, dark forest. In fact this is how the film opens, with the little wolf watching a suckling baby.

From here on though things get very unorthodox, and I'm not sure it's possible to give a conventional, linear sort of description of the film.

The film is based on the childhood memories of playwright Ludmila Petrushevskaya, which are turned into astonishing, mesmeric images by director Yuri Norstein. Pretty clearly the movie is about the loss of innocence,and about war (there are scenes in which women recieve government notifications that their husbands/sons/brothers have died in action), but I think the film is more generally about the nature and structure of memory, and that certain images shouldn't be interpreted as having a particular, literal meaning.

Norstein uses a combination of 2D and stop motion animation, but he also varies the whole style of the imagery from one segment to another. The story is told mainly in greys, browns, sepia and earthy reds and night-time colours. Sometimes sequences will seem highly overexposed, deliberately blurred, and stylistically totally different from what comes before or after them. Nevertheless the overall effect is a dreamy, surrealist, symbolistic atmosphere which lacks any really developed characters, except perhaps the little grey wolf himself, whose role is cryptic, but who turns out to be a lot less fearful than the nursery rhyme suggests. He seems a sensitive, innocent, elemental, and at times almost lost character, as if he were part of that memory, youth and innocence, sadness and beauty which the film is all about.

This is a film which really defies any sort of surgical analysis. Or perhaps I haven't done a very good job. I would urge you to see the thing and decide for yourself. Very obviously it isn't going to appeal to most people. I can't even think of anything else in our database which it remotely reminds me of, except Norstein's other work, and perhaps the more surreal moments of 'The Triplets of Belleville'. I have seen other European animations which it does remind me of somewhat, and you would have to say it had a feel that was more Eastern European than anything else. Certainly not remotely Japanese or American.

'Tale of Tales' comes on the DVD 'Masters of Russian Animation Vol 3' (see the profile to order it) which features about a dozen short films made in the late 70's and early 80's. These vary in quality, and I wouldn't call all of them masterpieces by any stretch, though they're all memorable - but it's worth the price for this one alone.

Incidentally, this film was voted the best animated film of all time at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles. If anyone remembers the antipathy between the USA and USSR back then (boycotting each other's Olympics, for starters), that ought to tell you something about how good it is.

This is the best 'short' animated film I have ever seen.