Mikhail Tsekhanovsky

Mikhail Mikhailovich Tsekhanovsky (russian: Михаил Михайлович Цехановский; — 22 June 1965) was a Russian and Soviet artist, animation director, book illustrator, screenwriter, sculptor and educator. He was one of the founders and unchallenged leaders of the Leningrad school of Soviet animation. Meritorious Artist of the RSFSR (1964).''Peter Rollberg (2016)''
Historical Dictionary of Russian and Soviet Cinema
— Rowman & Littlefield, p. 751—752 ''Sergei Kapkov (2006)''. Encyclopedia of Domestic Animation. — Moscow: Algorithm, p. 699—700, 244

Early years

Mikhail Tsekhanovsky was born in Proskurov (modern-day Khmelnytskyi, Ukraine) into a Russian noble family. His father Mikhail Yurievich Tsekhanovsky (Polish: '' Ciechanowski'') (1859—1928/29) was an Active State Councillor and a sugar manufacturer, an official representative of the All-Russian Society of Sugar Manufacturers who emigrated to Paris following the October Revolution. His mother Zinaida Grigorievna Tsekhanovskaya died in 1899 aged 32.

Tsekhanovsky was raised in Saint Petersburg and studied in the First Saint Petersburg Gymnasium, the most prestigious school of its time where only children of noblemen were accepted. He started painting while still in gymnasium, and upon graduation left for Paris where he was trained as a sculptor in private workshops between 1908 and 1910. On his return Tsekhanovsky entered the Imperial Academy of Arts and the Saint Petersburg Imperial University Faculty of Law, but left both of them with the start of the World War I and moved to Moscow. He then entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture which he finished in 1918.''Vera Kuznetsova, Erast Kuznetsov (1973)''
Tsekhanovsky
. — Leningrad: Khudozhnik RSFSR, 116 pages

Same year he was enrolled to the 16th Army by the Soviet authorities where his talents were used for agitprop. Tsekhanovsky drew posters, designed agitational trains, painted cinemas and clubs, carved sculptures and made scenery for the front theatre. From 1920 to 1922 he also headed the art studio at the Smolensk Red Army University. Among his students was Mikhail Volpin who later wrote screenplays for many of his animated projects.

Leningrad period

From book to film

In 1923 Tsekhanovsky demobilized and returned to Saint Petersburg (then Petrograd, renamed to Leningrad in a year) where he continued the art career. Among his projects were cinema posters that advertised foreign movies. He also taught art at the Tavricheskaya Art School. In 1926 he joined a group of book illustrators headed by Vladimir Lebedev which specialized on children's literature. Tsekhanovsky's area was popular science. His distinguishable "industrial" art style influenced by Lebedev and the constructivism aesthetic brought him fame.

In 1927 he illustrated the ''Post'' poem by Samuil Marshak about a letter that followed his friend Boris Zhitkov in his adventures around the world. The book saw many re-releases and has been since considered the peak of Tsekhanovsky's craftsmanship. Biographers agreed on that the book itself was designed according to the rules of film editing and was "full of movement". The artist also produced a number of flip books, thus his turn to animation was only a matter of time.

In 1928 Sovkino signed a contract with him for an animated film based on ''Post''. Tsekhanovsky, unfamiliar with the media, collaborated with Ivan Druzhinin and his own wife Vera Tsekhanovskaya, both professionally trained beginning animators. They had to improvise on their way and ended with a mix of traditional and cutout animation (called flat marionettes at the time) that brought Tsekhanovsky's unique vision to life. The silent version of ''Post'' was released in 1929, and in 1930 a musical score by Mikhail Deshevov was added along with a voiceover and some text by Daniil Kharms, while the positive was colorized by hand. It became the first Soviet animated color and sound film, while also the first to gain domestic and international acclaim. Frank Lloyd Wright showed it to Walt Disney as an example of thought-provoking animation.

Picture and sound

For the first time Soviet press started talking about animation as a new form of art, which was in fact director's original intention. As he wrote in his critical essay ''From Murzilka to Big Art'', filmmakers of that time took animation for a "secondary, creatively insignificant offshoot of the big art of cinema, but not as a branch of graphics and painting, not to mention a separate form of art... Technical, professional and artistic processes of building a graphiс film are entirely different from the filmmaking process... Animation is not a filmed marionette, not a puppetry, not a theatre, not cinema... It is a new spatiotemporal type of fine art".''Sergei Asenin (1983)''
The Wisdom of Fiction: Masters of Animation about Themselves and Their Art
— Moscow: Iskusstvo, p. 201—205, 97

In the same essay Tsekhanovsky brought up the subject of unity of animation and sound, as well as the concept of graphical sound which he is credited with inventing way back in 1929. In 1931 he directed two experimental "naturophotographic" live shorts ''Gopak'' and ''Pacific 231'' made as attempts to illustrate a national dance and Arthur Honegger's orchestral work by synchronizing visual imagery with music.The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda