TRAILER: Animated Documentary “1917 – The Real October”

TRAILER: Animated Documentary “1917 – The Real October”

November 14th, 2017

Jerry Beck

I love unique and diverse uses of animation to tell stories – and in recent years we’ve seen the rise of the feature length animated documentary – a genre that uses animation to its best advantage. Here’a trailer from a new such film, from German filmmaker Katrin Rothe. 1917 – The Real October tells the story of the Russian Revolution, set in the heart of St. Petersburg, detailing the fall of the Tsar to the Bolsheviks seizing power. The film, currently on the festival circuit, animates cuttings and puppets with silkscreen decorations, drawings and paintings, not to mention images from the archives. Here’s the trailer:

The film uses five characters/narrators based on real people: Zinaida Gippius who kept a record of the events and was very close to the interim government. Vladimir Mayakovsky, a very provocative revolutionary poet; Maxim Gorky; Alexandre Benois, an art critic ; and Kazimir Malevich, an artist.

Asked about the film’s animation techniques, Rothe said in an interview with Cineuropa, “I began to incorporate animation in my work as a documentarian in 2003. It’s a style that I’m trying to delve deeper into and is quite a spontaneous technique. Stop-motion animation takes a lot of time and everything has to be very precise, but it’s fairly simple, and this time I wanted to experiment with cut-outs as part of a more cinematic approach. It’s therefore a mix that we dubbed “2.5D animation”. This was my first historical film, and animation is a wonderful means of expression because you can convey a huge amount of things in a single image.”

No US release is set as of this time.

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Jerry Beck

Writer, cartoon producer and author of more than 15 books on animation history. A former studio exec with Nickelodeon and Disney; currently on the faculty at both CalArts in Valencia and Woodbury University in Burbank, California.