Director, People’s Artist of Russia
USSR State Prize laureate
“As a child, when I was very ill, I used to have this recurring dream. As if in the blackness, there is a thick parallelepipedal stack of the thinnest paper, about a meter high. And I must quickly and carefully, sheet by sheet, move the entire stack to another spot. I try to do it as quickly as possible, but the old stack does not get any smaller and the new one next to it hardly grows.
Later, while working in animation and dealing with tracing paper, on which the layouts of movements were drawn, I recalled again and again my childhood nightmare.
I was born on 15 September 1941 in the village of Andreevka, in Penza Region – one of the places where the evacuees were sent at the very beginning of the war.
In 1943, my mother, my older brother, and I returned to Moscow. My mum, Basya Girshevna Krichevskaya, worked all her life in preschool institutions: a nursery, a kindergarten, the Mother and Child Room at a railway station.
My father, Berko Leybovich Norshteyn, was a woodworking machine technician. He died when I was 14 years old. I didn’t have time to really get to know him. From the stories, he was an interesting person. Having received no education, he knew higher maths, had absolute pitch and an extraordinary musical memory. He could whistle Wagner and Schubert by heart. I think that my older brother Garik, who studied music and later became a violin restorer, inherited the craftsmanship skills from our father.
Mum did not have any outstanding abilities, except that she cooked well and protected her children from the horrors of life; out on the street I was constantly reminded of my Jewish origin.
I got an education, finished the ten years of school, combining the last two years with classes at an art school, where, as it turned out later, my future wife Francheska Yarbusova studied.
At one point I worked in a furniture factory.
In 1959, I entered a two-year course for animation artists at Soyuzmultfilm Studio, and began working there in 1961.
Even though I met many wonderful directors at the studio, including Tsekhanovsky, Khitruk, Atamanov, Kachanov, Ivanov-Vano, Dezhkin, Polkovnikov, and many others, the desire to leave the studio was equal to my dislike of animation, because I dreamt of being a painter.
My attempts to enter art institutions ended in complete failure. As if fate itself was showing me my place in life. Six volumes of Eisenstein did their pernicious work – I caught the directing fever. At the film studio, I met my future wife and production designer Francheska Yarbusova (Francheska Yarbusova has worked as production designer on the films The Fox and the Hare, The Heron and the Crane, Hedgehog In the Fog, Tale of Tales, The Overcoat, A White Skin, A Little Locomotive from Romashkovo, Plasticine Hedgehog, A Boy and a Ball, etc.), which resulted in the birth of two children Boris and Katya and the films The Fox and the Hare, The Heron and the Crane, Hedgehog in the Fog, Tale of Tales, and the unfinished Overcoat.
My teachers are: Altamira and Lascaux caves, Spas by Andrey Rublyov, Michelangelo’s last sculpture Pieta Rondanini, Meninas by Velasquez, the last period of Goya, Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Mussorgsky by Repin, Pavel Fedotov, Chardin, Millet, Russian and European avant-garde, Jean Vigo’s film L’Atalante, Eisenstein’s six volumes of selected works.
But the most outstanding teachers are my grandchildren – and children in general. Looking at their guileless smiles, at their delicate narrow shoulders wrapped in their little shirts, you understand that all art in the world makes sense if love blossoms in our souls.”
Filmography:
• 1968 The 25th, the First day (in collaboration with A. Tyurin)
• 1969 The Seasons (in collaboration with Ivan Ivanov-Vano)
• 1971 The Battle of Kerzhenets (in collaboration with Ivan Ivanov-Vano)
• 1973 The Fox and the Hare
• 1974 The Heron and the Crane
• 1975 Hedgehog In the Fog
• 1979 Tale of Tales
• 1999-2001 Good Night, Kids! (opening and closing title sequences)
• 2003 Winter Days
• 1981-present The Overcoat
Books by Norshteyn: Tale of Tales, Hedgehog in the Fog, The Fox and The Hare, Snow on the Grass.