The Overcoat (animated film)
| The Overcoat | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Yuriy Norshteyn |
| Produced by | Yuriy Norshteyn |
| Written by | Yuriy Norshteyn Lyudmila Petrushevskaya |
| Story by | Nikolai Gogol |
| Cinematography |
Aleksandr Zhukovskiy Maksim Granik |
|
Running time
|
65 minutes |
| Country | Russia |
| Language | Russian |
The Overcoat (Russian: Шине́ль, Shinyel) is an unfinished animated feature film that has been the main project of acclaimed Russian director and animator Yuriy Norshteyn since 1981. It is based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol with the same name.
Around 25 minutes were completed by 2004. The unfinished film has been shown publicly in several exhibitions of Norshteyn's work around the world and clips of it have been included in a few documentary films about Russian animation and culture.
On March 13, 2007, Norshteyn stated that he planned to release the first 30 minutes of the film with a soundtrack into theatres by the end of 2007. However, as of April 2017[update], the film remains unfinished, its production time of over thirty years the longest for any motion picture in history.
Upon finishing his film Tale of Tales in 1979 Norshteyn decided that the next project for his small team (consisting of himself as the animator and director, his wife Franchesca Yarbusova as the artist and his friend Aleksandr Zhukovskiy as the cinematographer) would be an approximately 60-minute-long film based on Gogol's short story The Overcoat. Norshteyn has said that he considers The Overcoat to be as important a work of literature for him personally as one of the chapters of the Bible.
By 1981, when work on the film began, Norshteyn had been working at Soyuzmultfilm (the main Soviet animation studio) for 13 years and had worked on some 40 films and directed or co-directed six. Progress was slow, with many interruptions (Norshteyn estimates that only about three years of work were actually done). Norshteyn says that Viktor Tinyaev (Виктор Тиняев) helped him during this period. In 1986, with only 10 minutes of the film completed, Norshteyn was fired from the Soyuzmultfilm studio in which he had worked. This was despite the fact that his films had gathered many international awards, and Tale of Tales had been voted the best animated film of all time by a large panel of international critics in 1984.
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