Films

Today I watched - and I don't recommend this sequence for sanity-preserving purposes but:

1. The first half of Schindler's List;
2. The second half of Ben Hur;
3. A bunch of animated shorts by one Yuri Norstein, that my dad got out of the public library. Crappy transfer, scratchy mono sound, nearly destroyed tape. ...Anyone else seen these? Film students? Animators? Russians? People who like the idea of cult animated short films from the Soviet seventies? Damn you, I know you're out there... Anyhow, if you get a chance to watch these, scrape together the requisite half hour. The first one is called "Fairytales of Fairytales," and... is hard to assign a plot to... but there's soldiers going off to war, and a little girl skipping rope with a bull, and a very cute wolf that cooks potatos and tries to steal paper from a poet who's more interested in his lyre, and a baby, and apples and ravens and snow. It's magnificiently evocative and haunting, given which I almost prefer the second one, which is called "Hedgehog In The Fog" and is about exactly that, like a Russian Beatrix Potter story. We were halfway through a third short that was a romantic comedy of errors between a heron and a crane, but then my dad had to go to bed.
   
   ...Right then, back to anime it is.