Remember, remember... there was an infant suckling at his mother's breast in this cottage in the woods, contented as he listened to the lullaby she sang, but there was someone watching through the window in the cold forest air outside. He was the little grey wolf (voiced by Aleksandr Kalyagin), and he saw the whole of this child's life from way back then to the present day, fragments of time that were scattered through his experience, fragments such as when the baby's family would spend time out in the fields, with his sister skipping, his mother attending to the chores, his father playing the harp... but the war had come.
For many animation experts, Tale of Tales, or Skazka Skazok as it was in its original Russian, is either the greatest cartoon ever made or the second greatest, thanks to another, The Hedgehog in the Fog, often being voted in the top spot. Was it any coincidence that both of these were directed by the same man, Moscow animator Yuriy Norshteyn? Even in his twenties, he was being acknowledged as a major talent, with his sad-eyed, often quite beautiful imagery and poignant themes striking a chord worldwide - that was, when they were able to be seen. He would have trouble with the Soviet authorities of course, just about every important filmmaker of his era there did, but this also meant distribution was not always as good as it should have been.
Notably in the West, where for good or ill cartoons were often seen as kids' stuff: certainly Norshteyn's work was not the type of thing to show up on Saturday mornings, but as if the quality of his productions was inescapable, so it was that he managed to find his audience internationally. Often for those outside of the Soviet Union, they would be stumbled across by the unwary viewer in out of the way time slots, either late at night or as filler in the afternoons, and they would be left wondering what this magical storytelling was. Appropriately for this particular film, they would stick in the mind, occasionally dredged up from the memories as one of those "what was that cartoon?" questions that so often haunt the corridors of nostalgia for generations.
Not that Tale of Tales was an easy work to interpret, and it was just as possible to watch it and barely latch onto its meaning; even those who considered themselves well versed in Eastern European animations could come up with various interpretations of the exact details Norshteyn implemented. But what was plain was that these visuals were the result of the director delving into his past and assembling in a fractured order what he found there: the men of his childhood who went off to war, the dances they held before they went and after they came back - well, some of them - and maybe something as simple as eating an apple, one of those tiny details which can bring so much rushing back. All through this is the poor, hassled wolf, traditionally the figure to be feared in fairy tales, but here someone sympathetic, and presented with a kindly humour as he tries to make sense of humanity, knowing he will never truly be part of the events he witnesses. This may mean more to Russians than anyone else, but its excellence was able to be appreciated by all. Music by Mikhail Meerovich.
