Rein Raamat 90

ical power,” said the censors. “Never,” Trnka replied. “I denounced
the sins of the Catholic Church!” Moscow-inspired governments
were very anticlerical.
If sagacity is the strength of the weak, the rule was that the creatives
always remain weak. Men of great value such as Miroslaw
Kijowicz or Gyorgyi Kovásznai were subjected to great harassment.
Censorship and freedom were in a grapple for thirty-five years, the
1970s and the 1980s being the heyday of auteur animation in the
world. The Europeans of the two trenches always agreed on stylistic
innovation, or more precisely, the auteur film. There seemed to
be only one rule. Do your own thing. Make the film that reflects you.
At one point, even the leaders of the Soviet Union lost grip. First, the
states incorporated into the Russian Federation, then Russia itself
opted for a more liberal art. Andrey Khrzhanovsky directed the
“Glass Harmonica”, a brilliant and ruthless denunciation of intellectual
oppression; Yuri Norshtein’s melancholic and nostalgic “Tale of
Tales” won the grand prize at the 1980 Zagreb festival, and put an
end to Socialist Realism and the monolithic devotion to children.
These were the years of Rein Raamat’s best films. Raamat was a
director, not an animator and didn’t have an identifiable visual
style, but his colors, editing and plots were all marked with a characteristic
strength. “Big Tyll” is, in a way, animation’s counterpart to
Eugène Delacroix’ Liberty Leading the People (1830).
Giannalberto Bendazzi, currently an independent scholar, is a
former professor of the History of Animation at the Università degli
Studi di Milano and a former Visiting Professor at the Nanyang
Technological University in Singapore. Bendazzi started his career
as a journalist and was always an independent, self-funded scholar.
He turned to full-time academic teaching by the end of the 1990s
and has lectured extensively on all continents.
An Italian by birth, Bendazzi’s efforts are devoted to international
projects. He is an acclaimed author in his sphere and his
best-known book is Cartoons: 100 Years of Cinema Animation
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