Norshtein good night kids. Sad lullaby by Yuri Norshtein

If there are programs on the domestic television screen to which the term “cult” is applicable, then “Good Night, Kids” certainly belongs to them.

The program “Good night, kids” has been on screens since 1964

It just so happens that in our country, “cult” programs are also the most “long-suffering”. They have had to endure so many changes in economic models and the vagaries of viewing habits that their essence is lost in the flow of change. And what kind of traditions can we talk about if the program has been on screens since 1964? However, the main thing can still be grasped.

Screensaver from 1971. The time of the broadcast changed, and after it the hands of the drawn clock “failed”

If a real artist gets down to business, then, believe me, he will see and embody the very essence of the idea in his work. This is what happened with the screensaver for the program “Good night, kids,” which was drawn by cartoonist Yuri Norshtein.

The screensaver was created by both Alexander Tatarsky and Yuri Norshtein

But, alas, few had a chance to see her. After being on air for three years, she disappeared from the screens “at the request of the audience.” The author of “The Hedgehog in the Fog” and “Tale of Tales” did not reach the mass television audience.

The screensaver, created by Yuri Norshtein and Valentin Olshvang, is made in a retro style. This is the palette in which the work is done and eloquent details. Retro style is also a memory of the past, namely of childhood for viewers at the turn of the century. Something good, familiar, but inexorably unattainable - almost a fairy tale. Memories of beloved, sometimes funny, clumsy toys, simple childhood joys.

The first frames are the transformation of painting into animation. Statics becomes dynamic, as if book illustrations come to life in a dream. Before us is a typical still life - an artistically organized order on the table. The camera pans and we find ourselves witnessing the turbulent life boiling under the table. Firstly, the tablecloth creates a kind of curtain, this is the first step towards movement in the picture, well, and secondly, the world is accessible to a child, the universe is hidden from the eyes of an adult, this is what is usually hidden under the table.

Yuri Norshtein's screensaver is a mini cartoon with its own story

Here is a typical children's entertainment - soap bubbles. Any adult associates them with fantasy and, of course, with the theme of childhood. The alphabet that one of the characters is leafing through is, again, a reference to the first steps in this world, to elementary school. Sweets: condensed milk and jam are a favorite children's delicacy. Living toys are another element of the children's world. It is worth noting that all these actions occur simultaneously. It is very difficult to see them. Therefore, it is interesting to watch the screensaver several times and discover more and more new details in it.

The hare, with the help of a bell (this is how the program's intro melody begins on the screen), calls the characters from under the table to watch an evening fairy tale. Here you can see a kind of reference to the motives of Lewis Carroll's story “Alice in Wonderland”. Tea party and March hare are quite obvious rhymes, given that we are definitely not “on the surface”. Again, the clock and the way the character deftly operates it is another reference to Carroll’s motifs.

The clock body has its own stage and its own curtain, which continues to develop the theater theme set by the stage frame of the tablecloth.

The theme of the game is continued by the children's railway, using which the characters rush to their destination. The climax of the screensaver - the toy characters sat in front of an imaginary screen to watch the program.

The second part of the screensaver is a lullaby. Its plot is getting ready for bed. The cross-cutting motif is the decorative design of space. There are fences, a doll's house, and screens. The world around a child is just a stage in which he acts out his performances (is it really that different from the world of an adult). But dreams are the true world, there is no need for decorations, everything is “for real” there.

Yuri Norshtein's screensaver for "spokushki" took a year and a half to create

Full of allusions and deep meaning, the screensaver by Yuri Norshtein took a year and a half to create. But it was not appreciated by the audience.

Perhaps because its idea lies not in the concept of designing a children's program, but in reflections on the topic of childhood as such. And this is too difficult for young viewers to understand. By the way, Japanese businessmen were ready to purchase the resulting material, but the deal did not take place. The history of domestic television has been replenished with another forgotten masterpiece.

The idea of ​​devoting an entire exhibition to a two-minute TV cutscene seems absurd. But what if the author of the animated miniature is the living classic Yuri Norshtein, and the program for which it was created is the popular “Good night, kids!”?

In 1999, Norshtein, together with artist Valentin Olshvang, created the introductory and closing videos for the children's program of Channel One. They lasted only two years on the air: parents complained about the creepy hare and the hooligan bear - Norshtein's world seemed to them too phantasmagorical for harmless fairy tales.

15 years later, we have to admit that this miniature, which has not caught on on TV, is the last completed work of the 75-year-old master, who, God willing, will finish his Gogol “unfinished construction”, but when will that happen... And it is this miniature that can be used in the format of a multimedia exhibition become the key to the magical worlds of art and childhood.

Looking at the endless sketches of cartoon characters, one can only be amazed at how many nuances, details, and plastic finds are hidden in these two minutes of video. But most importantly, we see how, step by step, an amazing atmosphere is created, characteristic of Norshtein’s pinnacle works - “Hedgehog in the Fog” and “Tales of Tales”.

Essentially, the film was made “from scratch” - immediately, without script development, - comments Yuri Norshtein. - Recording a film with a storyboard is a more organic option for animation than a verbal one, since cinema is a plastic art in motion. And where else can you accurately see the development of the action, if not in the storyboard?

Norshtein never hid the fact that he was a director, not a draftsman. A completely different matter is the mesmerizing collages of Valentin Olshvang based on the cartoon. They are made with paint on transparent plastic, and sometimes the author uses several layers of substrate to achieve the depth of the pictorial space.

The exhibition “Every evening before going to bed...” is located on two floors: the upper one is occupied by materials for “Good night, kids!”, and the lower floor is home to installations by artists of the new generation. It is this “additive” that turns an exhibition of working materials into a conceptual art project.

A staircase decorated with children's toys leads from the second floor to the ground floor. The path to the kingdom of Morpheus, which for millions of children begins with “Good night, kids!”, ends in a dark room with bizarre objects of obsession. And the first thing we see is the installation “Dream...” by Alexey Tregubov.

An overturned bed floats in the air. Apparently, a strong support is hidden in the sheet hanging from it, but it really looks like a miracle, possible only in a dream. Next is a structure of glowing neon ruins, from behind which a moon lamp peeks out. “In a fairy tale you can ride on the moon...” - my favorite lines come to mind, but the author Olga Bozhko points to another first

A red-haired girl, a mended bear, a hare with a pocket watch and large, human-like teeth drink tea, rush to the puppet theater for the start of the evening performance, and go home on a toy locomotive. The girl, having covered all her plush pets, extinguished the candle and scratched her bare foot, hides under the blanket. This is how the program “Good night, kids!” began and ended in 2000. The screensaver, created by Yuri Norshtein in the manner of old Russian fairy tales, mysterious and slightly melancholy, did not last long on the screens, was filmed and has been kept in the director’s archives to this day.

Today this screensaver has become the main exhibit of the exhibition “Every evening before going to bed” - a new project of the Solyanka Gallery, prepared for the 75th anniversary of Yuri Norshtein, the author of the cartoons “Hedgehog in the Fog”, “Cheburashka” and “Tale of Tales”. The artist worked on the intro to the iconic children's TV show by hand for two years, paying great attention to detail. The result was a 2.5-minute animated video.

According to the exhibition organizers,

the work did not catch on on television because it was too unusual and slow for mass television; the mini-cartoon lacked optimism.

Evgeny Odinokov/RIA Novosti Yuri Norshtein

The children's program required a simple introduction, while Norshtein's video required the viewer to concentrate, mentally work and be completely involved in the world created by the artist.

True, in 2003, at a festival in Tokyo, leading animators and film critics included it in the list of the 150 best animated films of all time.

At the opening of the exhibition, Yuri Norshtein personally walked guests through sketches on film, storyboards, graphic sketches of characters and scenes created by him together with Valentin Olshvang, a Russian director and co-author of Norshtein. Following the chain of editing and exposition tapes, the process of creating the program “Good night, kids!” could be followed step by step.

“A huge amount of work was done,” said Norshtein. - We assembled the girl from the screensaver literally piece by piece: from the works of da Vinci, Serov, Morozov, absolutely every detail mattered to us. The girl has many roles: she is a child, she is a housewife, she is a mother, a grandmother, she is a friend and she is Madonna.”

The general producer of Channel One, Konstantin Ernst, claims that he became the producer of this “extremely completed work of Norshtein”: “Yuri Borisovich is subjective, has an explosive temperament, in general, you cannot call him an easy-going person. But he can. He's just a genius and that explains it all. And a genius needs to either be helped or not interfere,” the head of Channel One told TASS. - Which, in fact, is what I did in this joint work of ours. For which I am grateful to fate, “Good Nights” and Yuri Borisovich Norshtein.”

Norshtein and Olshvang are not the only heroes of the exhibition. The curators of the Solyanka Gallery asked artists, inspired by the work of animation directors, to show

how they feel the state between reality and sleep, on the very border of falling asleep, when the voice of the unconscious begins to interfere with the monologue of consciousness, and the room changes, ready at any moment to become a mysterious cave, a royal living room or a deserted shore.

Gallery director Fyodor Pavlov-Andreevich is sure that telling a child only good fairy tales and expecting him to grow up to be an honest and decent citizen means being mistaken. “In reality, children expect to be told very different stories - ones that they are actually ready for,” he says.

In the next two months, the basement floor of the Gallery on Solyanka will become a place where children will be allowed to do everything: play with matches, look at the full moon and walk alone along the dark streets. To make this possible, the artist Rosa Poe went into the forest with a volume of Icelandic fairy tales and brought to the gallery bare branches frozen in a circle of moonlight, between which tiny birds glide. Which of this is real, and which is a play of light and shadow on the wall, only the attentive eye of a child can figure out. And from the forest you can walk straight into the open mouth of a huge clown created by Ivan Razumov. Only adults might be afraid of it, but brave children will climb inside and see how in the video there are already dozens of laughing clowns flying in an endless spiral and swallowing little fearless guests.

I stitched the video together from these two files (for those who want to see it in better quality):
http://www.mediafire.com/?dymndmmlt0g
http://www.mediafire.com/?xzjzeybt4ji

But maybe this is not the full version yet? The Pilot website says it should be 2 minutes 50 seconds, but here it’s only 2:26.

“For a year and a half I made the screensaver for “Good night, kids!” - three minutes. And then it was removed from the screen.”
-Yuri Norshtein

“This screensaver by Norshtein did not catch on on Channel 1 and was rejected for its strangeness and slowness, although it lasted the same two minutes and fifty seconds allotted to it. The quiet story that happened under the tablecloth on a winter evening gave the fleetingness tangible integrity. For two minutes and a half we were hidden from the bustle with the children, wrapped in a large grandmother's scarf, but people, accustomed to the rhythm of the video, did not understand why they thought for a moment.
Based on sketches and drawings for “Good night, kids!” the year before last a calendar was released (unfortunately, in a very small edition). In the preface to it, Yuri Norshtein wrote: “Children will not survive without the help of adults. We won't survive either if we don't listen to baby talk..."- Dmitry SHEVAROV

I would buy a calendar like this for 2009...

Some more pieces of articles and reviews that I found:

“How did your viewers react to Norshtein’s latest screensaver?

She was ordered by ORT, she remains on the channel. Norshtein is a famous artist, but he is not a screensaver. Every day they call and write to us about this screensaver, they say that it is terrible, that it is dark, that children do not want to watch our program. But it was brought down from above, the screensaver was ordered by Konstantin Ernst."
- program director Valentina Prasolova

"In the fall of 1999, another “dark” screensaver appeared, in which there was a hare ringing a bell (author - Yuri Norshtein). The screensaver caused a lot of criticism from children and their parents because of the toothy hare"
- http://vif2ne.ru/nvk/forum/arhprint/1641733

“By the way, at the same time, Norshtein filmed a screensaver for the program “Good Night, Kids” with delicate, seemingly ancient drawings. But it turned out to be too sophisticated for our television and lasted only a month on the air.”
- http://www.pilot-film.com/show_article.php?aid=67

"In the fall of 1999, a “dark” screensaver appeared, in which the camera looks under the table, and toothless mutant hares are shown (many children were very afraid of this screensaver; author - Yuri Norshtein)."
- http://otvety.google.ru/otvety/thread?tid=2c8458f622da810d

“And for “good night kids” there was such a screensaver at one time, also made by Norstein, just generally the embodiment of all the terrible dreams of childhood. Many mothers began to complain that children cry before going to bed.”
-77easterly77

“An ugly screensaver - a toothy hare, a hunched doll that blows soap bubbles, but it looks more like smoking a cigarette... And they showed it to children... And the picture is very gloomy, although it is clear that it is more likely a stylization of the early twentieth century. .."
-Cheriksoft

“Well, in my opinion, this screensaver is much more positive and interesting than this terrible “Sleep, my joy, sleep.” Now, I remember Norshtein’s screensaver from 2-3 programs, since I haven’t watched “Spokukha” anymore. But it’s Norshtein’s screensaver I liked it very much."
-MDKWarrior

On the other hand, I received this feedback from the creator of the page "Yuri Norstein on MySpace":
"That segment is one of the best things I ever seen from Norstein and animation in general. It"s amazing."

Also, in Laputa in 2003, 140 animation professionals ranked this screensaver at 81st place on the list