In the Russian countryside, a family lives next to a railroad track. A boy remembers when he and his parents had a cow, living off its milk and using it as a beast of burden. The cow has a calf that the boy’s father sells. The cow, perhaps grieving for its lost calf, acts strangely, bolts from the boy, and meets with disaster. The boy dreams of calf, cow, train, and plow in a phantasmagoric collision. Later, the boy’s remembrance of things past becomes sweet and elegiac. —IMDb
Petrov was born in the village of Prechistoye (Yaroslavl Oblast) and lives in Yaroslavl. He studied art at VGIK (state institute of cinema and TV). He was a disciple of Yuriy Norshteyn at the Advanced School for screenwriters and directors (Moscow).
After making his first films in Russia, in Canada he adapted the novel The Old Man and the Sea, resulting in a 20-minute animated short — the first large-format animated film ever made. Technically impressive, the film is made entirely in pastel oil paintings on glass, a technique mastered by only a handful of animators in the world. By using his fingertips instead of a paintbrush on different glass sheets positioned on multiple levels, each covered with slow-drying oil paints, he was able to add depth to his paintings. After photographing each frame painted on the glass sheets, which was four times larger than the usual A4-sized canvas, he had to slightly modify the painting for the next frame and so on. It took Aleksandr Petrov… read more
Wonderful movie. Watch it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9VCt_EZBu8&playnext=1&list=PL35220E34AEF84C0F&index=23
