There’s a Firebird of a different kind in this short film by an Estonian animator whose equally short Hell was featured here some time ago. Hell and Firebird are so stylistically opposed they look like the work of two different film-makers, although in the case of Hell this is a result of the film being based on the etchings of an Estonian artist, Eduard Wiiralt, Firebird (1974) is simpler fare, another example of the cultural fallout from The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, and a rather late one at that, not only in style but in the progress of its scenario.
Where The Beatles had Pepperland as a frozen monochrome world which has to be restored to life and colour by the Fab Four, Rein Raamat presents a monochrome city whose listless inhabitants are enlivened by the arrival in the sky of a giant coloured bird. The bird’s changing colours bring further life to the city itself; flowers and fountains burst forth, to the annoyance of a ferocious black cat who evidently preferred the earlier dispensation. As with any symbolic story made in the Soviet bloc, you can’t help but see this as a mirror for life in the world outside the cinema. Watch it here.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The groovy video look
• Hell, a film by Rein Raamat
• Tadanori Yokoo animations